I understand that Thanksgiving is basically just a harvest festival with some feel good racial friendship themes attached, yet I'm loathe to participate in a Thanksgiving themed prompt as I feel like celebrating this day is throwing salt in the wounds of Native Americans. I'd ask a Native American how he/she feels about Thanksgiving, but for some reason these people are hard to find. Sure, America's a great place but that doesn't mean we need to gloss over our troubled history. Celebrating Thanksgiving the way we currently do would be like Jews in Israel eating "peace falafel" on Naqba Day. Having said all that, we live in the greatest country in the world, and as the child of immigrants I feel especially thankful for a great number of things afforded to me by simply having been born here.
My father came to the United States with a mechanical engineering degree and fluency in English, yet was forced to drive a cab to make enough money to bring my mother, brother, and sister over from Pakistan. He was able to save up enough money to start a small business, at which point he and my mother felt comfortable enough to have another child -- me. I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to be the only family member born in the United States, which I can only assume is the reason I am both the tallest and highest SAT-scoring Aziz.
I'm spending my Thanksgiving on the beautiful coast of Oregon where my parents run a small coffee shop in their semi-retirement. Having grown up in Iowa, small-town Oregon is strikingly familiar. These are the parts of America that seem to have been left behind despite the great economic advances seen in other parts of the country. Every other day or so, some soul will wander into my parents' shop and ask if we're hiring and I can't help but be reminded of those heart-wrenching scenes recounted in The Grapes of Wrath. The unemployment rate in Oregon is rapidly approaching eight percent and is on its way to nine percent in neighboring California. It's not just blue-collar and rural workers who are feeling the brunt. Recently a number of my friends were laid off from their jobs in San Francisco. These were all hard-working, well-educated young people who find themselves in the same situation as the laid off lumber industry workers in Oregon for example.
This will indeed be the "the worst recession in a generation," and I fear it could last longer than the two years some are saying it will take for our economy to start growing again. In times like these I'm just thankful that I and my family are all currently employed and that we now have people in charge of this country who will hopefully tackle this issue with the urgency that is required.
-- Danish Aziz
RSS Feed