If I have to be honest, I am really thankful for my teachers. Through a profession of sacrifice they have really had a strong effect on me. The longer I stay in school, the more seriously I take it, and the feeling of regret about not paying attention in a single math class in high school grows stronger.
At some point one starts to realize parents and teachers are real people who make mistakes, and are just as selfish and immature as you are and yet they carry themselves with the wisdom for which they are held accountable. They are required to behave sagely, yet reach and inspire people personally every day, often in heartbreaking conditions of backwards bureaucracy. How thankful am I to be a student and not a teacher. So this Thanksgiving I want to give it up to the teachers and parents as teachers, who are rarely given enough credit. Go call or write your favorite teacher and tell them thanks.
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As for what I don't give thanks for, I know this is rather abstract, but I could do with less greed and corruption in the world. I have a love-hate relationship with the fundamentals of capitalism. On the one hand, I believe it's a flawed system that depends on the exploitation of people and resources or the oppression of people as consumers. (Not to mention awful side-effects such as the homogenization of cultural production through commodification.)
At the same time, though, I grant that it is a pretty ingenious system that fundamentally doesn't do too much more than monetize and organize the concept of value or wealth. Theoretically relative to the cruel forces of survival in the natural world, it is fair. So why has this system produced such an unfair and inefficient distribution of wealth and power? Of inequity? Witness the ridiculous globe-trotting abilities of some versus the total lack of economic freedom of others. It is only when the system is cheated or manipulated through corruption -- and this is not rare, sadly -- that we see the terrible conditions it is capable of creating.
So this Thanksgiving, on the cusp of an economic recession, material resource depletion, and a James Bond film lacking suaveness or actual dialogue, take a moment to think about what wealth really means. If the most powerful people were much more rigorous capitalists, they would understand that behaving solely in economic self-interest is not in anyone's long term interest—not even theirs.
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