Democracy's fate in the chill winds of November

Thanksgiving is all about saving the Union from forces that almost destroyed it. President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it a national holiday in 1863, midway through the benighted Civil War.

November defines turning points in the most tragic hours of history.

Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address on the battlefield of that great war on Nov. 19, 1863, once the cannonballs were silenced and the dead buried. Gen. Robert E. Lee's cocky rebel army was depleted. For the Civil War president, victory at Gettysburg was the beginning of the end.

Now as we pilgrims feast in 2021, that meaning remains clear as day. There is a sense of huge losses and precious gains at our shared tables. It's fair to say we civilians felt besieged as if at war.

This Thanksgiving weekend in November, we're still in the grip of a global pandemic. We're also haunted by the sixth day of this year. The body politic is scarred from a civil war waged within, a violent blow to American democracy by a mob incited by a president.

I was there, but in a larger sense all who love democracy were inside its citadel. The coup failed, but believe me, it was a close call.

By proclamation from war-torn Washington, the first national Thanksgiving (a New England tradition) was marked in November 1863. Lincoln was grateful to providence - and perhaps Gen. George Meade - for winning the Battle of Gettysburg in July. By the Fourth, the smoke cleared.

That narrow win over Lee was the catalyst for celebrating the autumn holiday and the greatest piece of presidential prose. In five elegiac minutes, Lincoln stood and redefined the raging war.

Suddenly, the meaning was "a new birth of freedom" from slavery. For Lincoln himself was profoundly changed.

His battlefield utterance went beyond the Union map to the meaning of the "unfinished work" of freedom. Standing on the ground of enormous human suffering, in the crucible of war, he honored the dead and inspired the living.

The world often notes that Lincoln was not an abolitionist when he ran for president in 1860. True, yet the lanky prairie lawyer became the greatest abolitionist of all. To transform a nation, the revolution came from within.

This year, as President Joe Biden labored to lead the nation out of despair in a double calamity, we have not heard a soaring address. But the pain we were in was often written on his face and felt in his voice.

Biden is, above all, sincere. Never have we needed that more after the other president traded only in lies, boasts and insults.

I might add, Biden is much more thoughtful and wise than the loquacious senator who served for 35 years. He's undergone a transformation as a public man, perhaps by mourning his son Beau. Lincoln also lost a beloved son while in office.

Sworn in with a bitterly divided House and Senate, shattered social bonds and a chorus of critics (a White House Washington Post reporter tweeted his agenda was "dying"), Biden achieved improbable victories this very month.

First, he signed a regular infrastructure bill with bipartisan support.

A social infrastructure bill - from universal pre-K to home health care - finally united House Democrats for a narrow victory that seems solid enough to sail into the 50-50 Senate with high hopes.

Call it Biden's Gettysburg. If the second - Build Back Better - becomes law, it will transform middle- and working-class lives and address the climate crisis.

On a bright morning after eight hours of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California shouting into the night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was the finest field general Biden could have, gaveling the 220-213 vote.

Finally, the day President John F. Kennedy died was Nov. 22, 1963, one century after the 1863 Gettysburg Address. Is it just chance that Jack Kennedy, son of Massachusetts, was slain in Texas, the largest Confederate slave state?

Lincoln opposed admitting Texas to the Union. Kennedy had to win the Jim Crow state to win reelection. The murdered presidents reach across time with intertwined fates.

November brings darkest days but may leave a light of hope at the table.

Democracy wins, but not by much, over those trying to tear us apart.

© 2021, Creators