A letter from Washington by Charles R. Larson

If you call an American a “turkey” or refer to some purchase (say a small appliance or anything mechanical) with the same word, you’ve used a derogatory term: the person is a loser, lacking in some basic quality; the item is defective or broken. 

Yet on Thanksgiving in the United States, most Americans celebrate this quintessential holiday by cooking and eating a turkey along with other traditional dishes. Thanksgiving 2009 (November 27th) appeared to combine both the festivities of the occasion and the negative aspects of a broken economy.  Worse, because of increasing poverty in the United States, a growing number of people who traditionally cook a turkey - considered affordable for most people - were without food or homeless on that day.

Thanksgiving is the holiday when more American families get together than on any other occasion during the year, including Christmas.  Its origins are somewhat murky, but one myth states that the Pilgrims, who settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts, celebrated their good fortune with the first Thanksgiving in 1620.  Did they cook a turkey that year?  It’s difficult to say, but turkeys were (and still are) wild in New England, and raising turkeys for Thanksgiving in the United States today is an enormous commercial business. The bird (sometimes weighing as much as 20 or 25 pounds), is stuffed and baked, and typically eaten with other traditional American foods: cranberries, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cornbread.

Weeks before the arrival of Thanksgiving this year, my mail was flooded with requests for donations for innumerable charities, requesting money specifically for Thanksgiving to help feed families and the homeless who would have little to eat if funds were not collected.  Barely ten days before the holiday, the newspapers were full of disturbing accounts of hunger in America: forty-nine million people, one child out of four, 14.6 percent of American households, in which food was either scarce or at times unavailable. These are staggering figures, the worst since 1995, when the government began compiling such figures.

The government refers to the problem as “food insecurity,” meaning skipped meals, reduced portions, or eating inexpensive food often lacking in significant nutrition.  The unemployment rate in the U.S., currently at 10.2 percent, is the greatest factor—another statistic that has reached the highest rate for decades.  Unemployment checks have been extended by the government and food stamps for the needy have increased by over forty percent during the past two years, but signs are that these increases barely mask the growing problem of poverty in America. Newspapers and nightly newscasts provide vivid accounts of entire families resorting to community shelters, as well as the particular difficulties of women raising children alone—too often with the children experiencing the greatest need.

These are grim statistics no matter how you process them.  Yet the polarities that existed before the Great Recession--as it is referred to by many people in the U.S. --continue largely unabated. Wall Street wizards, mortgage company fraud, bankers with outrageous salaries, all the things that we hoped would be changed in the United States after the election of Barack Obama, have mostly continued, as efforts to increase regulations of these financial businesses have largely failed or have been gutted.  The financial collapse of a year ago was an American-created and preventable debacle, just like the Depression in the 1930s.  Greed, opulence, and ostentation still largely rule in the United  States with the poor often out of sight from the rich.  It’s so easy to send off a check to a charity before one spends a few hundred more dollars for oneself on consumer goods that one already has in abundance and for which one has absolutely no need.

The Obama administration has valiantly tried to deal with the inherited recession, and most economists agree that something far worse would have resulted without the economic stimulus implemented by Congress nearly a year ago. But unemployment at the “official” 10.2 percent disguises the fact that if people who are part-time and therefore underemployed are included, plus those who have given up looking for a job, the actual unemployment figure is closer to 17 percent.  Many recent high school graduates, fully aware that they cannot find a job, have chosen instead to go on to college, at a higher number than in years.  And there are plenty of sad stories of recent university graduates, even those who have graduated from prestigious schools, who cannot find a job and have been compelled to move back home with their parents.

As a friend of mine remarked, many of us who are doing well, who have felt little effect of the recession, feel as if we are living inside a bubble.  Is the other shoe going to drop when a second round of higher mortgage rates goes into effect next year?  Will some exogenous event like the debt problem in Dubai pull the United  States economy back to where it was a year ago?  No matter how one looks at poverty in the United States, the key issue is jobs.  Not enough businesses are hiring new employees.  President Obama will convene a job council during the first week in December, but most people realize that there are few, if any, easy solutions to the problem.  If there were, they would already have been implemented.

Ten days ago, I was in downtown Washington, D.C., the center of the city, where my work rarely takes me.  This was about a week before Thanksgiving, “Turkey Day” as we sometimes call it.  There were more homeless people on the streets than I had observed in years: panhandlers, musicians playing on the street, hopeful that people would toss them a few coins; men and women standing at intersections where, if you are in an automobile, you stop at signal lights and people hope for a handout.  Some of these people were clearly the urban poor that we have always had, but there were newcomers.  I observed a woman, very well dressed, not pulling a shopping cart full of her belongings but loaded down with the biggest backpack I have ever in my life seen anyone carry and three smaller duffle bags in her hands.  She looked as if she were toting around a couple of hundred pounds; it was hard to believe that she could even move, but she did.

Increasingly, there are people like the woman I saw living on the streets.  This year, I doubt if she was able to savor the traditional Thanksgiving festivities.  Some people believe that America itself has become a gigantic, stuffed turkey.

By Charles R. Larson ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ). 

(Ed. Note:  Mr. Larson is Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C.)