By SUZANNE DOWNING
Imagine, if you will, what it was like to sit down at a rough-hewn table in 1621, the first Thanksgiving on a frosty, damp Cape Cod celebration.
On the one side, the Protestant Separatists, who left England to create a non-Anglican Christian colony in the New World.
Chances are, their clothes were by then tattered, their hair smoky and greasy, and they all could have used a bath. Of the 102 who came on the Mayflower, 45 of them had already died of scurvy and other disease.
They were not a glamorous bunch. Like a lot of Alaskans we know, they were rough and tough, but the first words of the Mayflower Compact said it all about their values:
“The In the name of God, Amen.”
On the other side, or perhaps squatting on the ground or sitting on a log around the fire, were leathery-skinned Natives dressed in deer hides, first inhabitants of the land, who had somehow seen the wisdom of helping the wool-clad newcomers get through their first winter, planting, and harvesting season.
They, too, lacked the benefit of civilized grooming. There were no Manscaped tools. Chances are, their hair was matted, smoky, and greasy, and they all could have used a bath. The Wampanoug were spiritualists who believed Mother Earth was their god, and they would thank the earth and any living thing for the gifts they gave the people.
Perhaps it wasn’t the first multi-cultural dinner in the New World, but it was one of the first documented. It had to have been a motley crew of two extremely different cultures, with not much evident in the way of shared cultural norms or values, finding a way to come together and break bread, if only for a moment.
Fast forward to 2020, a time when we are more multi-cultural than ever, and many of us sit down at tables this Thanksgiving with people from different backgrounds and understandings. It’s not just Natives and Europeans anymore. We are one big variety show when it comes to cultural norms.
In Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city and by far its biggest Native village, people come from across the planet — from Nome to Phnom Penh, Utquagvik to Upolu. Anchorage residents live in a functional city, but not so much a knit-together community. We’re a collection of communities.
Indeed, we are a mosaic that attends school, clocks in at jobs, and shops for groceries, and retreats to our tribal safe place.
Then came the virus from hell. And the importance of community cannot be overstated, when it comes to crisis response. A community of shared values is one of the essentials for recovery from a disaster.
In this case, the acting mayor of Anchorage has put forth yet another harsh set of mandates, her second since she took the reins of the city. Austin Quinn-Davidson does not have the earned authority of an electoral mandate; she is merely a fill-in mayor, appointed by the Assembly.
This makes it more difficult for her to convince a collection of cultures that she has any authority at all to force her will upon them. All they see is an imperious queen telling them they cannot work or go to school or even play sports.
That lack of elected authority may create a backlash, as the city’s economic underpinnings are knocked from beneath it — restaurants closed, people told to stay home, and children slipping further and further behind. Enforcers from the imperial mayor’s office are on the prowl, looking for offenders to fine.
The single institution that could have held our community of Christians, Atheists, Pagans, Buddhists, Jews, and Muslims together was our schools. This is true in most of Alaska, especially rural communities.
But since March, our schools have been shut down. That’s 260 days without the most formative part of our children’s days. It’s a long time for parents to watch their children fall apart. There’s no guarantee in January that the teachers union will agree to return to the classrooms.
It got worse. At the end of June, former Mayor Ethan Berkowitz mandated masks for everyone inside buildings in Anchorage, or wherever they come within 6 feet of others who are not in their households. Five months of mask wearing has yielded poor results. If the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage is to be believed, 87 percent of Anchorage residents say they are wearing masks when outside the home and around others.
On Wednesday, after five months of compliance, Alaska reported more than 700 cases of COVID-19 statewide, another record day in a parade of record days. Most of those cases were in Anchorage.
Eight months of shutdowns and hunker-downs, and five months of mask wearing have only made the poor among us even poorer, and the anxious among us even more anxious, and the angry among us even angrier.
So how is Anchorage doing? A transient city filled with people from all cultural norms, Anchorage is an example of what happens when a settlement doesn’t have shared values first, before the crisis hits. Without that shared sense of community, pulling together is almost an impossible feat.
Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson, who inherited the virus-management problem from Ethan “Booty” Berkowitz, didn’t start this war with COVID. She was plopped into the Mayor’s Office in the middle of one of the biggest crises Anchorage has encountered in its 100 years. Berkowitz bowed out during a crisis, and she became the unelected leader with the power to ruin people’s lives.
Quinn-Davidson is no better or worse than the rest of us. But, as she was not even challenged during the 2020 municipal election, she reflects the values of her liberal district, not the values of the entire community.
As we break bread this Thanksgiving, and reflect on where we started as a nation, this writer is reminded that those of us who are from the stock that blazed west and finally north are of a rebel spirit. We are not staid New Englanders who remained behind to manage the shops and mills of the East Coast. We are fiery and we are independent. Mandates do not suit us.
In small ways, we in Alaska are like the Pilgrims who left it all behind to make our mark in a new place. We are still the Wild West.
Our elected leaders must figure out how to not ruin us as a people, or destroy our spirit, but unite us in a way that honors the one thing that ties us together: Our sense of independence. So far this year, our civic leaders have only united Anchorage residents in opposition to their leaders. It’s a start, but that’s not building community.
The way back to a sense of community is to either open the public schools in Anchorage, or to give every family vouchers to allow them to create their own unregulated home-based or church-based (or back of the pizza parlor based) schools.
If Quinn-Davidson has the power to shut down restaurants, bars, bingo halls, and gyms, she has the authority to also set parents free to create their own schools this year. The school board will never do such a thing. But Quinn-Davidson actually could issue vouchers. It’s a way to return to a sense of control to families over their lives, and a pathway to a sense of community.
Suzanne Downing is the publisher of Must Read Alaska.
