Lara Zielin

This Thanksgiving, I am glad for the usual things — friends, family, an amazing job and colleagues I love — but every day I find I’m more and more thankful for the Occupy movements around the country. Their work to bring attention to corporate influence in government and to highlight the struggles of everyday people is both important and overdue.

Not everything about the movement is perfect. Far from it. But I’m still thankful for it, despite the flaws. Because for every messy-haired hipster the media wants you to focus on, there’s a smart, Atlantic-reading professional like Caitlin Curran there, too.

More to the point, I’m thankful because if the long lens of history has taught us anything, it’s that these movements are always derided as lame, unorganized, ridiculous, superfluous.

For example:

Crazy radical Alice Paul, who fought for women's rights, was brutalized at the Occoquan Workhouse (prison) in Virginia.

Women, do you like to vote? Or own property? Well, let me tell you, the suffragists at the turn of the century who fought for those rights had a horrible time in the media. After publishing their Declaration of Sentiments, these women totally took major heat. People called their actions “shocking and unnatural.” The movement became the subject for “sarcasm and ridicule” (Golden, James L. The Rhetoric of Western Thought, p.226).  And don’t get me started on the women themselves! Why, they were awful. Some of them even (*gasp!*) “smoked cigarettes on principle, drank Russian tea and talked with an assured and deliberate frankness of sex and of their own sex experiences,” (quote by Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, who actually joined the women’s suffrage movement in the early 1900s in England).

They didn’t have pepper spray back in those days, but the police and enforcers sure found other ways to attack the protesting women. In November 1910, Charles Mansel-Moullin wrote a letter to London’s Daily Mirror saying: “[Marching] women were treated with the greatest brutality. They were pushed about in all directions and thrown down by the police. Their arms were twisted until they were almost broken. Their thumbs were forcibly bent back, and they were tortured in other nameless ways that made one feel sick at the sight… These things were done by the police. There were in addition organised bands of well-dressed roughs who charged backwards and forwards through the deputation like a football team without any attempt being made to stop them by the police; but they contented themselves with throwing the women down and trampling upon them.”

I’d be hard pressed, however, to find a woman today who isn’t thankful for the courage and work of these women, especially in the face of a society that trampled  and derided them.

Attacked by the chemical industry and labeled as alarmist, Rachel Carson sounded the early warnings about the danger of misusing pesticides.

And hey, as long as we’re talking about fringe people doing fringe things, how about those hippies during the 1960s? Oh man, what a sorry bunch they were, with their free love and stupid clothes and crazy music. In fact, if you listened to Richard Nixon, they were Communist un-Americans (See also: Mason, Richard. Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority).

Well, guess what? Now, there’s this thing called equal pay that means my employer can’t pay me less just because I’m a woman. And there’s no longer this thing called the draft, which means my husband or son (if I ever have one) can’t be shipped overseas involuntarily to fight a senseless war. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, too. Those are pretty awesome. And no way any of it would have happened if it wasn’t for those hippie students who protested on campuses, and the masses of people who marched in the streets.

Hey, are you glad your ten-year-old isn’t working in a factory?

Are you glad you can vote without being beaten?

Are you glad there’s not rat poison in your bread or (more) chemicals in your water?

Well I am. Ergo, I thank the reformers. The hippies. The fringe writers, like Upton Sinclair. The environmentalists like Rachel Carson who worked to keep our water clean.

These movements are messy. They’re imperfect. But I’m okay with that.

I’m more than okay with it, even. I’m downright thankful.

[Image sources: Occupy picture from Occupy Portland, OccupytheNews.tv; Alice Paul Picture from AlicePaul.org; Rachel Carson from RachelCarson.org]

When your birthday falls right around Thanksgiving (sometimes on Thanksgiving, as mine does this year), it’s easy to feel like your special day gets usurped by visits from relatives, meal prep, and eating pumpkin pie instead of birthday cake.

Which is why, when I was little, my mom found a way to marry the two events (my birth and Thanksgiving, that is) in the coolest way ever. She made turkey cookies.

In grade school, we had to bring in treats to share with our classmates when it was  birthday time. Which, for the record, I’m pretty sure this is a tradition that dates back to the dinosaurs. I’m almost positive there were brontosauruses who had to bring in, like, hunks of redwood trees to share with the rest of the class when it was their birthday. Anyway, when I was a kid, the other moms would bring in cupcakes. Or Oreos. Or some flavorless cake from the grocery store. But not one of them — not one — brought in turkey cookies. I was the only one who had the mom who did that, because I was the only turkey baby in the bunch.

My turkey cookies for the office this year. Don't worry, I made more than three.

I loved it so much — that special feeling it gave me, of being born at an awesome time of year and being celebrated with something so unique — that I still make turkey cookies to this day. Usually I bring them into the office, and I try not to be all like, “Look, I am a turkey baby and this is what my people do!”

As you can see from the photo, it’s not exactly rocket science. You get a ginger snap, coat it with some frosting (or melt chocolate and spread it on top if you’re really ambitious) and stick candy to it. Candy corn for the tail, a Hershey’s kiss for the body, and a Boston baked bean for the head.

Whammo. Instant Awesome Person Status.

I’m thankful that my mom tried to bring a splash of creativity to our little Wisconsin school. I’m also thankful — not to suddenly wax cheesy or anything — for the amazing year that I’ve had, especially with the release of Aggie Winchester. Thanks for reading this blog, supporting my writing and sharing a turkey cookie with me this time of year.