On Wednesday, President Obama pledged to cut U.S. carbon emissions "in the range of" 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Obama also confirmed that he will attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen next month, as Aaron Wiener notes for the Washington Independent. But here's the catch: It's a one-day deal. Obama is only planning to stop by Copenhagen on Dec. 9 before flying to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize. The climate talks, on the other hand, span Dec. 7 to Dec. 18.
I traditionally do this loooooooooong drive up to Buffalo with friends on National Get In Your Car and Sit In Traffic Day the day before Thanksgiving, but just could not do it this year. Too burned out. Flights are always too expensive, so I'm going up for Chanukah/Xmas- I haven't been in several years anyway- and staying put this week. Perry flew down to join me. An Indian friend of his from grad school is having some of us over tonight, cooking Indian, and getting destroyed by me and Perry in Taboo. You may gasp at that, but if there is one other cuisine I would rather have than traditional Thanksgiving fare, it would be Indian. Especially since I've already consumed both pumpkin and pecan pie this week, which are really the essential parts, in my view.
Other than that, I'm in the middle of a lazy afternoon sipping chai and reading Barney Frank's biography, which is pretty good.
This is an open Thanksgiving Day thread. Feel free to leave thoughts on where you are, what you're cooking, football, any amusing family political conversations, or whatever else.
I have a Thanksgiving story for your consumption that has nothing to do with turkeys or pumpkin pie or crazy uncles.
Instead, in an effort to remind you what this holiday can really stand for, we'll meet some people who are thankful today for simply being free.
It's a short story today, but an especially touching one, so follow along and we'll take a little hop across the Atlantic for a trip you should not miss.
I don't want to get too gooshy as we go into the Thanksgiving holiday weekend by giving you all the stuff I'm thankful for, but it does seem like an appropriate moment to be a little more reflective than usual. The thing I want to focus on today is the hope for a better world.
It is very easy to be pessimistic and cynical about the chance for things to get better as we fight our issue and political battles. Wealthy powerful special interests are entrenched and seem able to run everything. Too many politicians are incompetent or corrupt. Well-intentioned organizations are sometimes pretty ineffectual. The establishment's conventional wisdom seems set in stone. And I think we have seen so many things in the last few decades that have made us cynical about our government and questioning about our leaders, it is easy to think that nothing will ever change. I know for me, reading the Church committee report about the CIA, The Pentagon Papers, and the Nixon White House tapes transcripts as a young man was enough to make me very skeptical about the nature of our government at the time.
I think a certain level of healthy skepticism about our government and the establishment is a very good thing, and should be cultivated. The problem arises when skepticism turns cynical and pessimistic, and infects how we view every single thing in life and politics. At the heart of progressivism is the hope that it is possible to make a better world, that progress is indeed within our reach. When Barack Obama ran a campaign with a slogan he borrowed from Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers, Yes We Can, and preached his gospel of hope, he was tapping into a long progressive tradition dating back to our very founding as a country. Heading into that terrible winter at Valley Forge, Tom Paine, wrote: "Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it and repulse it." Lincoln at Gettysburg, at that terrible moment honoring those tens of thousands of fallen soldiers at their gravesites, spoke of the hope "that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." Martin Luther King, Jr., in a discouraging moment in his great work, said that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it curves toward justice", and the civil rights movement anthem's chorus sang out "We Shall Overcome".
We progressives should embrace the hope that our movement, the progressive movement, has always carried as its banner. It is conservatives who have always feared change and doused the flames of hope, conservatives who said government could not do anything right or make progress for the American people.
I write this because I see too often the deep cynicism of many friends in the progressive movement, the assumption that virtually every politician is corrupted by being an insider, that every compromise in the legislative process is a sleazy one, that every progressive group is a sell-out. I see it in the responses I sometimes get when I write about my hopes for passing legislation that could be improved on in the future, where people ask why I think any piece of legislation will be improved on given that corporations run America. I see it in articles by progressive thinkers like Jamie Galbraith, who wrote on Monday an entire blog post about how hopeless everything was in terms of making changes in economic policy. I see it in progressive talk show hosts and comedians and media figures: a sense of gloom about any prospects for a better future are everywhere I look.
While righteous anger and cynical humor are an important part of our work, progressivism that is at its core cynical and pessimistic doesn't work over the long run. For one thing, it will burn itself out. When I was a young organizer being trained, I was told that you can't organize people if you are too depressed to be hopeful, that if you were feeling burnt out, you should take a vacation or even get into a different line of work. I still believe that to be true. Righteous anger is a great thing, and can feed you for a while, but if it's not leavened with hope, it won't sustain you over the long good fight. But it also doesn't work because the internal contradiction is too great. Telling people that we can change things for the better while being cynical about any hope for change is a self-defeating philosophy.
Albert Camus wrote in The Plague that "once the faint stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague ended." It is our job as progressives not just to attack the powers that be, not just to fight against the establishment, but to breathe life into those faint stirrings of hope, and to believe in them ourselves. It is easy to be a cynic with all the bad things that happen in the world. It takes more courage to believe that we can, someday soon, overcome. It is our hope and optimism that gives us the strength to keep fighting the odds against us, that keeps us going in the face of the money and power of the entrenched special interests. And history is very clear on this point: those with the faith and hope that they could indeed overcome the odds did quite often prevail. The abolitionists won their 40-year battle, the suffragists prevailed after 90 years of struggle, Jim Crow was finally beaten 90 years after African-American rights were abandoned by the North with the end of reconstruction. Through decades of violence, derision, arrests, intimidation, our progressive ancestors never gave into despair and defeatism. We should take their example to heart, and have hope for the future, hope that we can make progress, hope that we can build a more perfect union. Hope and virtue have survived: now let's make them flourish.
Laughing Liberally To Keep From Crying
by Katie Halper On Thanksgiving, The Dallas Cowboys beat the Seattle Seahawks 34 to 9. And the day before, when Bush spared two innocent lives, he achieved his own victory of 16 to 1. When Bush pardoned Pumpkin AND Pecan, who were about to meet the same fate as the turkeys televised behind Sarah Palin, he could boast of having 16 presidential poultry pardons under his belt. But Bush has also compassionately conserved human life, once. During his six-year governorship and eight-year presidency, Bush has pardoned one death row inmate, denied clemency over 50 times, and signed death warrants for 155 people, many of whom were innocent, mentally retarded, juveniles, recipients of unfair trials, and/or represented by incompetent and often narcoleptic lawyers.
From the election of 1968 on, we've just been through 40 years of misrule. During this time, many good things still were done, but they were done against the tide that was, at bottom, fueled by resentment at breakthroughs for racial and gender equality brought about in the 1960s. Although much remains to struggle for and achieve, I am profoundly thankful that that era is behind us.
I am thankful we have just elected our nation's first black president, even though it is far from meaning the end of racism in our land. For it does signal a profound turning point in the ongoing struggle for racial justice.
I am thankful that, in the wake of Proposition 8, there has been a powerful nationwide response from the GLBT community and its allies. Instead of setting gay rights back a decade, this response holds the promise of accelerating it greatly. May it be so.
I am thankful that we are not satisfied with having elected the most progressive President in 40 years, and we are not satisfied with ourselves, either. I am thankful that we want and expect more of ourselves, and more of the leaders we elect.
I could go on, but, I want to know, what are you thankful for?
Looks like plucky Sarah Palin is expanding her fan club from evangelicals to vegangelicals. Seriously, how could any animal rights activist not love the sight of Palin blathering to the press while a worker in blood-spattered overalls blithely slaughters turkeys a few feet away?
...we have ended up in the absurd situation today that most of us, as consumers, know very little about what we eat; and, sensing a "dark side" to our food production, many of us don't even want to know.
Even our most progressive presidents can be addled by Agribiz propaganda. President-elect Obama--thanks to his corn-fed constituents, we presume--is regrettably fond of ethanol, unlike his rival, John McCain. And McCain's not the only Republican who slams the grain-for-gas scam. Arch conservative P.J. O'Rourke airs his aggravation with industrial ag in the current Weekly Standard:
Thanksgiving is the most American of holidays. It is rooted in our founding myths, in the struggle of European immigrants to understand and survive in a new land. In the triumph of perseverance and neighborly virtue over the harshness of the world we find ourselves in. We gather together with family and friends and eat new world foods to celebrate the survival of our founding settlers and the most beautiful time of the year for much of our country.
This is my third Thanksgiving in America since spending the prior five Thanksgivings in England. Living there gave me a much greater appreciation of what it means to be an American, to have rights, and to fight for those rights. I am immensely thankful that I am an American and that we have rights for me to defend.
