We Gather Together

Thanksgiving has always been a feast day for the gods of paradox. It's an ordeal to travel and yet we do; family reunions can be wildly stressful and yet painful to miss. It was invented by a bunch of Puritans who celebrated freedom by throwing a party, and so bequeathed us a holiday both secular and sacred, with parades and prayers that dare us to reckon with all that has changed, and recognize all that has not.

This is the kind of holiday we need right now, an intrinsically complicated one that comes at the end of a bitter harvest and yet finds something sweet to celebrate. Everyone is a pilgrim now, stripped down to bare essentials and a single carry-on bag to sustain us in a strange new world. So no wonder people are making a special effort to get home this year, set the table, unfold the napkins, make the time for a messy conversation with the people who know us best. This is where we find out how we are really doing on the character test: Have the events of autumn left us humbled, or hardened? Bitter at all we feel we have lost, or grateful for all that we once took for granted?

And if the answer is that we are entertaining both at once, hope and despair at either end of the table, we had better learn to do it gracefully. "We're living through an eclipse of normality, a twilight landscape," says Edward Linenthal, author of The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. "The sun isn't quite right. It's a little darker than it should be when you look at it." And in the strange half-light, people react to the same events in opposite ways. Bars show CNN instead of ESPN because patrons want the latest news, but a family doctor in a Chicago suburb cancels her subscription to the New York Times because the relentless coverage of fear and threats was taking a toll on her. Peace Corps applications are up 72% in San Francisco, even as Harvard alums fight to restore ROTC, and 100 times as many Smith College students turn out to meet the CIA recruiter as did a decade ago. People decide to get in shape in case they have to run down 50 flights of stairs, while others abandon their diets because fudge is a great antidepressant--and if the world ends tomorrow, they don't want their last meal to be a celery stick.

In the past two months, our public conversation has changed almost beyond recognition; arguments that were unimaginable last summer are now the stuff of talk shows and chat rooms. Should we torture terrorist suspects? Embrace racial profiling? Seal the borders? Bust the budget? It may be the surest sign of a healthy democracy that in the wake of an attack that stopped a nation in its tracks, we have begun to move forward again in every direction, with less consistency but more urgency, engaged in an argument with ourselves and one another over what these times demand of us.