By Sam Burnham
@C_SamBurnham I want to talk about Thanksgiving. I mean the holiday and the expression. In recent years Thanksgiving has gone from a an actual holiday, to the official beginning of the Christmas season, to a mere speed bump between Candy Day and Materialism Month, featuring Consumer Claus. We don't talk about it, don't think about it, don't even stop to consider it. Throw out the pumpkin, put up the tree, let's go shopping. Oh, everyone is still going to eat. There will still be turkey and dressing (did y'all know there are folks who strain the giblets out of their gravy? Just learned this yesterday myself.) There will still be sides and deserts aplenty. There will still be football and talking politics with your uncle and all that. But will there really be any thanksgiving at Thanksgiving? As consumerism continues to consume this land and consumers become the consumed, there is yet greater and greater demand. There is the eternal striving for increasing abundance. Everything will never be enough, there will have to be more. We must have more, bigger, better, shinier, and more elaborate on our mission to convince ourselves that we are filling the hole within us with the right stuff. Maybe if we get enough of the stuff we'll finally be happy. But no matter how much there is, it is never enough. The things we have to have never make up for the lacking of significance. There is never any contentment. Without contentment there is never gratitude. Without gratitude there is never thanksgiving. Without thanksgiving, that famous Thursday meal in November is just a celebration of gluttony and abundance. We think of contentment as a type of surrender. We aren't striving for more because we are lazy or scared or incapable of doing "better." But we never ask ourselves the reason we want more. Is there a reason for it? What is the actual need we are trying to fill? Is it an actual need or just a passing desire? With a week to go before the Thanksgiving holiday arrives, let us take inventory. Stop with the hustle and look around. Think about health, wealth, security, happiness. Do you have these things? Look at family, friends, faith, hope for the future. Do you have these things? Rather than looking up to the more fortunate to drive your desires, look back on the less fortunate to allow yourself some gratitude. Don't make it about seeing yourself as better than them. Make it as "but for the Grace of God go I." Because that is reality. We are so blessed in this country. Yet we are living in turmoil. We fight over political power, cultural slights, we fight over fighting. Our problem isn't our differences. Our problem is we lack thanksgiving because we lack gratitude because we lack contentment. Take a week. Think it over. celebrate thanksgiving, not just Thanksgiving.
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By Sam Burnham
@C_SamBurnham I awoke following a long weekend of football, home projects and more football (especially a long night sitting up to see if Tennessee was going to give ABG CFB a losing record on opening week) to a few tweets from a reader. This sort of thing often leads to me sitting at the keyboard spitting out whatever rebuttal needs to be communicated. So here I sit. The point this time is an article in the New York Times (continuing their fascination with Southern stuff) about Southern publications and their approach to dealing with this region we call home. There were particular publications and links mentioned both in the article and in the aforementioned tweets that had me clicking on a few articles and reading what I could of them. This was followed by a lot of thought. I see what is going on in many publications, both print and on line, and how they both experience and portray the South. We see in this article that one is setting out to try to fix it. Another is boasting it is "Reckoning With the South." And then we see a few others that may be taking a little too much of a Pollyanna experience of it. What this leaves us with is an incomplete picture. The South is not a neat and pretty artisan doily that comes in a package via UPS. But it is also not broken and it is not in need on some progressive vengeance. All of this points to the same idea - that there is something inherently wrong with the South and being a Southerner. The two sides of response to this problem, polishing it up nice and "fixing" it, equally mistreat the South. I chose the title of this article from the opening essay of I'll Take my Stand. John Crowe Ransom opens that volume with the essay and it's warning that if the South capitulates to the rest of the nation, if it merely takes its lumps and hops on the train of progress, it will cease to be what it is. It will cease to be Southern. Looking at this some 87 years later, I see much of his warning already blossomed and withered. His talk of the factory system moving in and exploiting Southern villages can be documented in a thousand mill villages across the South. Perhaps you've seen a few. But more than a warning to mill villages, Ransom was warning us against a mass assimilation. He foretold the possibility of a future in which the South became so enamored with "progress" that the Southern Tradition itself would be threatened. And as Atlanta has spread across the landscape, we see that tradition being overwhelmed by an onslaught of chain restaurants and shopping malls - many now vacant or in disrepair. What factories remain have downsized their work forces with robotics and any new industries are using automation as well. The small country store is a thing of the past. The television broadcasts new stories by people with strange accents who can't correctly pronounce the name of the town they're reporting from. And now we are starting to see statues that have stood in town squares for over 100 years must be removed. No one must ever speak anything respectable about any man who served in the Confederate military. Anything that happened before 1865 falls under the "slavery" tab and anything that happened in the next 100 years was nothing but Jim Crow. And under no circumstances must anyone ever whistle Dixie. By industrializing the South took the road more traveled. And it has made all the difference. The progress isn't all bad. Good riddance to slavery and Jim Crow. In my years I've learned that the color of a man's skin does not determine his worth as a human. And as Dr. Sean Busick recently said, "The Southern Tradition is big enough to include both Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash." If we're honest, the Southern Tradition is incomplete without both of them. And no one is complaining electricity, paved roads, or indoor plumbing. Again, some of the progress has been good but not all of it. The trick is trying to find the balance between totally shunning modern innovations and becoming Yankees that eat grits and enjoy Bluegrass. The real South will be found high in the Appalachians, down on the coastal islands and marshes, or along the red dirt roads. In these places the New York Times has never seen, Atlanta has forgotten, and we cannot help but love, we find truth. It's not always pretty or profitable but that's the South for you. ABG is not here to fix the South. We're not here to reckon with it. We're not here to modernize it. We don't care much for craft cocktail lounges or the (mostly non-Southern) idiots who brought violence to Charlottesville. Neither of those things sound very Southern to us in 2017. We're here to talk about the real South, not one we wish to re engineer. By Sam Burnham @C_SamBurnham I tease my wife about Christmas. It's true. It's a habit that I developed before we were even married. She has a gift for decorating and her festive spirit has always been contagious. She's quick to trim the tree, usually having the lights blazing before Thanksgiving. This is a tendency I have usually frowned upon as the retailers push the Christmas shopping season ever towards July in an effort to separate us from our money. That particular piece of the free market system provokes my innards toward nausea and has destroyed any stray urge I might have had to visit a shopping mall. But I must admit that in the last few years my teasing has become more of a hollow tradition. I do it because I've been at it for almost 20 years and it just wouldn't be Christmastime without it. My meaning of Christmas is growing, changing, maturing. And I'm learning to completely sever commercialism from the season. I don't wish to reduce this article to a "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" bumper sticker as the experience I'm having is not cliche and the existence of such a product is a bit ironic in itself. It's also too easy to set up a creche in the corner of a room and use it to convince yourself that you're keeping the real reason for Christmas this year. As a family, we have our creche and we are observing the a weekly Advent reading around our table each week. We have candles and scriptures and plenty of other reminders of the religious nature of this holiday season. But that still doesn't capture the entire experience that I'm having. Our tree and the other lights around our home do make a stark contrast against the bleak appearance of a dreary overcast day. Our elves, now in a state of semi-retirement have made a much less intrusive appearance as I have seen them teach many lessons of fun, redemption, and beauty. I cannot imagine a Christmas without them and the memories of the way they amazed my sons. Everywhere I look this year there are memories. The season begs me to look deeper into myself and expect to unearth an increasingly better person. It calls for me to chisel away at the fake facade of Christmas and uncover forgiveness, charity, grace, beauty, wonder, gratitude. Like the elves, this might require a little mischief and probably something often credited as magic but that believers know as faith. When asked what I want for Christmas, I smile. You can't buy me anything in a store. I won't show ingratitude for a gift but for me, a physical possession just isn't that impressive this year. Hearing my sons read to our family from the scriptures, having a meal together, these things are fleeting as time is passing and they will leave the nest to start their own lives. But what is going on is going to instill in them, and in myself, things of permanence - memory, tradition, faith. These are things that time cannot erode, cold cannot freeze, heat cannot melt and tyrants cannot banish. The symbols may be temporal but the realities are much more permanent. How could I ever unwrap a package and find anything remotely like that inside? So those are a few of my thoughts. The season is young, so there are bound to be more. Dig deeper this year. |
Sam B.Historian, self-proclaimed gentleman, agrarian-at-heart, & curator extraordinaire Social MediaCategories
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