November 25, 2011

To Whom it May Concern:

I am writing this letter to you because you opened for your “Black Friday” sales on Thanksgiving, thus depriving your employees of an opportunity to gather with their loved ones for a Thanksgiving meal in peace.

It is an act of utter disrespect for your employees to demand that they come into work on the Thanksgiving holiday—a day which should be reserved for gathering with those one loves and giving thanks for the blessings of life—simply so that you can make more money.

Injustice demands reparative action; therefore, I ask that you do the following things:

(a) Issue a letter of apology to each employee who was expected to be at work at any time on Thanksgiving Day 2011, and a press release indicating that you have apologized to those employees;


(b) Give every employee who worked at any time on Thanksgiving Day 2011 one full, paid eight-hour day off during the 2011 holiday season, in reparation for your denying them time with their family and loved ones; and


(c) Pledge that 2011 will be the last year your store will be open at all on Thanksgiving Day or anytime before 5AM the morning after Thanksgiving.

I am writing to you specifically because I have patronized your business in the past—but in honor of the employees you forced to work on a day that should be reserved for gathering with loved ones, I will be making it a point not to patronize your business during this holiday season, and to spend my money at establishments that have enough respect for their employees and their loved ones to remain closed until the morning of the day after Thanksgiving.

I will not spend one penny at your store until January 1, 2012 at the very earliest.

Further, I am publishing this letter on my website and on the social networks I use, in hopes that it will be shared with others and hopefully become a movement to deny our hard-earned money to companies that deny their employees a Thanksgiving Day with their families and loved ones.

Sincerely,
James G. Gilmore

Please feel free to copy this letter and send it to companies that you patronize that made their employees come in on Thanksgiving for “Black Friday” sales.

* I’m not including places like gas stations or fast-food joints on this list, since I count them as a sort of “essential business” for people who have to travel on Thanksgiving. People need to gas up their cars to get to Grandma’s house, but they could have waited another day for a 42″ HDTV.

For now, I wanted to direct your attention to one of the more fascinating uses of integrative Web technology I’ve seen in a while, the Kennedy Presidential Library’s We Choose the Moon. Not only is the site updating the mission in “real time” (40 years later) with actual radio transcripts, it also has twitter feeds for Eagle, the Command Module, and CAPCOM.

Having spent a little time researching among the Nixon library’s Apollo 11 materials, I really have to acknowledge what must have been some serious cooperation between the archives that were required to make this happen. To do this kind of project, they’d need cooperation from archivists at at least five NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) archives – the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon libraries, NASA’s own archives, and the rest of the Executive Branch archives in College Park. That this site came about is a testament to the ways in which serious archival research can come alive for the general public.

Stay tuned to We Choose the Moon to keep following the Apollo 11 mission.

I have to show my age here and admit Farrah Fawcett was a bit before my time – I mostly know her from cultural histories and stuff as the poster that graced every teenage boy’s wall in the ’70s – but I heard that the documentary she did a few months ago about her battle with cancer was incredibly moving. It’s a shame she passed away only a few hours before…

Michael Jackson. The King of Pop. The very epitome of cool when Charlie and I were young. (Danny was too young and missed this, I think.) I remember the first time my dad got a car with a cassette player, one of the first tapes he had in there was Thriller, and I swear we wore that tape out. I remember being confused because Michael was singing a song about a dude named Billie Jean but referring to him as a “she.” The lyrics of that song didn’t make a lot of sense to me back then. Regardless, in my youth, there was nothing cooler than Michael Jackson.

Of course, in the ’90s, he got weird. I imagine the adults around me had some inkling that growing up without a childhood and living under constant pressure to perform was only bringing him closer to some kind of breakdown, but he got weird at about the same time as we hit the teenage years… and we turned on him. (Not that he made it that hard, what with the plastic surgery and Neverland Ranch and the constant allegations of pedophilia.) I know that throughout my teenage years, I chalked up my once thinking he was cool to my being a kid and not seeing all the weird that had been there. (That, of course, also wasn’t helped by the rise of grunge and the fall of the ’80s pop-glam look that MJ personified.)

But, of course, all that was before the rise of YouTube… which, judging from the top videos tonight, is reintroducing a whole generation to the earlier MJ – the one whose moves we spent our childhoods trying to emulate, the one whose songs make it impossible not to start dancing a little. And I have to say, for the record: Man, did that guy have it back in the day.

Sure, his music was tinged with all that ’80s optimism and “Heal the World” myopia, but there’s an anger in his voice that I don’t think I’d noticed until I rewatched some of his stuff tonight. The later MJ, the one I came to know and mock in my teenage years, was saccharine-sweet, in a constant race to recapture the childhood he never had; the MJ of the early to mid-80s had an edge, a passion, some fire in his eyes.

But that MJ is no more, and the weird MJ is also gone; it’s now up to us to construct how we all want to remember him. As for me, I’m going to remember the earlier MJ, the one who always made me tap my feet, the one who got me and Charlie and my cousins and all my neighborhood friends trying to do the Moonwalk on solid-wood floors in our socks.

Rest in peace, Michael Jackson.