Petty Thanksgiving

I now get what I could never quite understand about the past: how history breaks into the most private spaces of people’s lives.

OK, this is petty but I think about it every Thanksgiving.

A few years back, my ex-friend tried (without success) to shame me for spending Thanksgiving with my family. Because, you see, she had spurned her elderly parents' pleas for a family holiday. They offered to do land acknowledgments, talk about the dark side of US history, the works. But nothing could placate my friend, who kept her husband and new baby away and made her parents feel awful for expecting they'd get together to celebrate a "genocidal holiday."

So, what did she do instead? Well, she said she invited a few friends over and made dinner: "Next year we might volunteer."

And then she waited, clearly expecting praise for her high-mindedness. Finally, I just said: It sounds like you had a nice Thanksgiving dinner and that you made your parents feel like shit.

When I think about friends getting sucked into the social justice cult, I think about her. She'd been my writing partner for years. When we were stumped, we wrote colorful first drafts to clear our minds. I could have recognized her writing style anywhere. But that was years ago.

Her vocabulary contracted and stiffened. Eventually, she wrote only in prefabricated sentences, and perhaps thought only prefab thoughts. She stopped asking questions and started lecturing me when I did. When she pointed out (bitterly? triumphantly?) that I didn't seem to miss her or her friendship, I couldn't disagree with her. It feels like she smothered, righteously, the person I'd loved, who became quieter and quieter until she fell silent altogether, only to be replaced by a joyless scold.

Sometimes I think this is just the time we're living in. It's put color in all those history books I read. I now get what I could never quite understand about the past: how history breaks into the most private spaces of people’s lives.

I thought we would always speak freely. I never thought that—just a few years later—we'd never speak at all, that there would be at the same time nothing to say and everything to say but no way to say it and be heard.