Thursday, November 22, 2018

Snoop Dogg Thanksgiving

      Did you hear what Snoop Dogg said when he was given his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?  He said, “I want to thank me for believing in me… for doing all this hard work… I want to thank me for having no days off; I want to thank me for never quitting [and] trying [to do] more rights than wrongs; I want to thank me for just being me at all times.”
      Well, I want to thank Snoop Dogg, too.   He gave me a good belly laugh, and, if my rhetorical analysis doesn’t ruin his humor, he’s helping me launch a light-hearted conversation about the nature of thanksgiving.
     I commend Snoop Dogg for unashamedly talking to himself.  For some reason, people widely associate talking to themselves with mental illness, but in order to have a healthy sense of self, we must have a knowable self to talk to.  The Psalmist talks to himself when he prays, “be still, my soul.”  The words consciousness and conscience, are ancient compound words which involve an inner “knowing together.” There is always an implied “other” in our self-awareness.  To give thanks involves telling ourselves that we have been given gifts-- even if, as Snoop Dogg assumes, it is our mysterious inward other that is giving them to ourselves.
    I commend Snoop Dogg for first thanking his parents, wife, and friends.  These acts of conventional gratitude went unreported, and they give context to his other self-congratulatory remarks.  We should be responsible to our best selves, after all.

     Yet, I want to thank Snoop Dogg for saying out loud what we are tempted to believe but are too timid to say.  We’re easily deluded into thinking our well-being depends on our good decisions.  We forget the ways others have enabled us to make good decisions. Perhaps most of all we forget we can’t make good decisions without that inward other who pervades the whole universe as well as giving life to our consciousness.  Forgetting that other is how Snoop Dogg set the whole concept of thanksgiving on its ear.