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I watched three Thanksgiving Day parades last week — those in New York City, Chicago and Houston. What a treat! The more I watched, the more I realized the rich cultural stew America has become, and how boring these parades would be if white nationalists ever get their way. It dawned on me that parades are more than parades. They are paradigms of our life together.
A parade is a large public procession. A paradigm is a conceptual pattern, framework or lens through which we understand reality. A parade entertains. It celebrates what a community values. A paradigm shapes the community’s beliefs and practices; it provides an example of how things should be done.
The parades I watched were as diverse as any on the planet. Walking nutcrackers, Hasidic Jews and African dancers shared the streets. The Grinch, Santa Claus and dinosaurs with sharp teeth crowded the skies. In New York, the Queer Big Apple Corps band marched along with superheroes in capes and wheelchairs. The University of Alabama band was as controlled and precise in its performance as the Alcorn State band was high-stepping and energetic. Aloha dancers in snowsuits, passionate flamenco dancers and Korean dancers dressed in Asian finery gracefully succeeded one another. Native Americans in tribal regalia followed Buddhist monks and Mexican women on horseback. In Houston, unsurprisingly, there was a plethora of pickup trucks and golf carts, plus a smattering of vintage cars and vehicles of the future. I especially cheered for the clean-up crews that had to follow the Canadian Mounties.
Serious, sexy, silly, spiritual — these parades were America in all its diversity. Big Bird and bicycle brigades. Grown adults struggling to stay grounded as the balloons they tethered threatened to carry them away, and people on stilts, high up, ready to catch them. This is our paradigm. Clearly, it was not a Chinese parade with a million soldiers marching in lockstep. Nor was it Russian with massive displays of imposing weapons. It was not even British with all their pomp and circumstance. The crowds everywhere were just as inclusive and diverse. They were MAGA and progressive, shoulder to shoulder, Black, Hispanic, Asian, white, and every generation, gender and economic class under the sun. They all had a rollicking good time. This was America at its best — sauntering and celebrating the melting pot or stew pot of cultures we have become.
Gilbert Friend-Jones is a minister at Morningside Hills United Church of Christ in Edina.
