Digital BW, The Print

I sent this out to each of the groups I serve as a moderator on.
I thought it might be appropriate here as well.

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I would like to offer my personal note of  Thanksgiving to each of you:
friends, comrades, fellow list members, and those with whom I've crossed
swords in past.

Although Thanksgiving in the US grew out of the old English tradition of
Harvest Home, and has been tied to religious puritanism and the veil of
tears brought to Native Americans by the "settlement" of the Americas by
Europeans, it still is, at base a non-denominational and essentially
non-commercial holiday.  While Christmas is axiomatically religious and
has become the near embodiment of commercialization of  holidays,
Thanksgiving in the US stands alone as a shared experience and
essentially non-commercial one (heck, it's focused on home-cooked food,
even Mc Donald's hasn't tried cracking that nut).  If  Christmas is a
religious and commercial event, Thanksgiving is the quintessential
"Everyman's" holiday.

The very focus of Thanksgiving upon friends and family, upon our human
interactions with each other, instead of with some commercial entity or
a religious one is quite apropos, I think to the online list/group
community.

For just as your friends, family, and shared memories make Thanksgiving
today a touchstone that Americans return to, it is those same elements
which make these groups successful.  Like a Thanksgiving dinner table,
on these groups we see bickering, wrangling, rude grabs for the plate,
even dissembling and childishness.  But, we also share our knowledge,
share our experiences, and yes, amazingly  (given the disembodied nature
of computing) , join  in a shared enterprise.

When a group of starving  Puritans transplanted Harvest Home to the
bleak and cold autumnal shores of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,  it was
their very shared experiences and separation, their insularity from the
outside world, that became a lasting part of the Thanksgiving paradigm..
   For while they were starving everyday, and the wind blew cold through
their new colony, for while they and other settlers had and would have
and create negative experiences with the Native Americans, for a brief
time, in a small place, all of that lay suspended.  For  a few hours,
all therein could eat, Native Americans and Europeans could see beyond
their differences instead to the shared experience of being human and
alive..

I won't speak to the outrages later attributable to the European
settlers and their kin, for like all else, this was a time when one
tries to forget the differences for a brief time, to rejoice at being
alive, to rejoice at sharing that life with others.

America has brought commercialism to much of the world, while that may
have brought "success," I would truly hope that we might bring the
Spirit of Thanksgiving along instead.  The lessons of tolerance,
acceptance, and sharing the limited resources of this earth are ones
that we would do well to remember and share in a world beset by distrust
and animosity.  Thanksgiving is a day when Americans of many walks
volunteer to help provide meals to those less fortunate.

In any event, to each of you, I offer this note of Thanksgiving and
Peace.  Allow me to thank you for creating a community which I am
lucky/blessed to be able to partake in with you each. In a very small
way, when you freely (and non-commercially) share knowledge or
experiences with your fellow group members, you are doing much the same
as those who provide meals to the hungry on this day -- you are sharing
what you can with others.   It is this sharing and building of
   "community" which makes these lists and groups successful, and why the
Thanksgiving Message is so appropriate for these fora.

May you all be well today...
Keith



"Just some guy," and founder of the Multiverse's largest EPSON printer
User Community (highly recommended by Vogon Poets and MegaDodo
Publications), at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EPSONx7x_Printers/

"For the rest of you out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together
guys"