RICH AND POOR MEANS WE ARE ALL POOR. THANKSGIVING REFLECTIONS
I was praying this morning about the material riches we will share this Thanksgiving, harkening back to the first Thanksgiving when the Native Americans helped out their fellow humans, teaching them, according to what we learned in school, how to live with the new land to which they had come, including how to grow corn (something they did not do in Great Britain). For their generosity, white Europeans repaid the Native Americans with deliberately stealing their land as well as probably inadvertently giving them a wide range of diseases that decimated their population. This became a de facto genocide. It’s a strange holiday to celebrate.
We live in a world that too often believes in win-lose thinking. Life is a zero sum game, so you and your team need to get yours and it doesn’t matter what happens to the other side. There are also some “enlightened” capitalists who understand that win-win is a better idea, especially when it comes to the other people in your own organization. If someone’s bonus comes at the expense of someone else’s in your organization, you should be looking for a different job.
But even too many of these “enlightened” capitalists don’t extend their thinking to the more than human world. If our material riches are purchased at the price of the degradation of the rest of creation, we will all lose in the not so long run. Ecosystems absolutely run on win-win. The predator that culls the herd of its weakest member—that’s win-win. The herbivore who eats the grass and leaves greater fertility in return, that’s win-win. The insects or mushrooms who live off of a tree, that’s win-win. Win-lose only occurs in disturbed ecosystems where ash borers or mountain pine beetles, for instance, aren’t killed by the cold the way they are supposed to be.
I’ve been reading an essay by Wendell Berry called the “Body and the Earth” where he makes the point that the idea of elevating the soul over the body, as Western thought does, means that both are degraded. Lose-lose even though so much of Western thought portrays the need for the soul to win at the expense of the body and simply does not understand that the only way the soul can be elevated is if the body is equally elevated.
How can we live in a world of win-win with the more than human world? I leave you with this:
Find the ways in which you most connect with the more than human world and go do them on a regular basis. It will make a difference.
Ask yourself why you were born in this place and at this time—what are you supposed to accomplish or be in your time on the earth? Then live as fully as possible into this.
So have a wonderful Thanksgiving with your family. And light a memorial candle for the millions of Native Americans who died because of European contact.
