Truth be told, I haven't been feeling the Thanksgiving spirit. Looking outward, it is difficult to see past the smoldering economic rubble that fills the lives of so many of those dear to me from my own tenuous outpost on the edge. With no plausible course of action on the horizon to bring appropriately wide-scale relief, let alone begin the rejuvenation and rebuilding that our system and society so desperately need, the call to dig deeper and muster up some tritism to serve as my offering on the alter of national habit has mostly just served to highlight a situation so grave for so many people that reveling in an annual orgy of gluttonous overconsumption simply feels a microcosm for so many of our current ills.

I'm grateful for Black Friday and cramming more victuals down my gullet in one sitting than many households (including my own) should responsibly make last for an entire week in the current economy! Yay.

So it was, under a dark cloud, that I wandered the internets ... sampling the fluff-headed bullshit offered up by the pretty people, self-centered fluff from those who's biggest concern in life is sports, and obligatory self-absolving highlights of whatever local groups spent their day providing a once-annual decent meal to ever growing ranks of the poors. Not much of a silver lining in sight. At Fire Dog Lake, Dakine manages to one-up my malaise by missing the point entirely.

Clearly the time had come to move past Thanksgiving 2011.

Also at FDL, Jane Hamsher has adopted the OWS movement with a unique combination of self-promotion and activism that has pretty much become a hallmark. The result is a campaign to help supply protest participants at various sites with items they need to sustain protest. Building on the groups pro-worker/pro-union posture, the supply campaign is being carried out with strong focus on sourcing from Union manufacturers - if none can be found, they are "at least" trying to find products made made in America. Totally cool. Unfortunately, with the state of American manufacturing, this has been somewhat challenging. So Jane has raised a general call asking people to highlight union/American manufacturers that might be able to provide needed supplies.

Now, Idaho isn't really a big union state. Nor is Idaho known for a great deal of manufacturing. So, I figured even on the off-chance we made something here that would be useful, our vendors would likely not be considered. But the seed had been planted. I became curious what sort of stuff Idaho's manufacturers might actually be able to provide.

I never did find an Idaho producer for any of the items that Hamsher is seeking, but I did find something else. A company with the initially promising name "Idaho Sewing for Sports." This is a woman-owned business run by Gail and Gunther Williams in Grangeville Idaho. The company makes various pads/coverings custom designed for the ski-resort industry; chairlift seat cushions, pole-wrappings, toboggan covers, stuff like that. Poking around, I discovered that the company does not directly sell their tubing products to the public and instead direct potential customers to "Residual Enterprises" in order to make their purchase. That's when I realized the Williams' and their business represent so much about the America we dream of - an example of what is right in the American family.

Residual Enterprises is a partially incomplete Word-Press site that appears to be a side-project of the Williams family to generate money for local charities through exclusive retail sale of Idaho Sewing's snow tube products. It is also a general site to promote the idea of business service within the community by celebrating instances of such service. Here, with understated modesty, we find a recent article written about Idaho Sewing (along with a handful of other businesses).

Gunther Williams’ family business, Idaho Sewing for Sports Inc. of Grangeville, Idaho, was hit hard by the recession. But laying off employees didn’t sit well with him. It seemed counterproductive to let skilled employees go in order to save the business, he says. So in January 2010, as work began to pick up, Williams took what some might consider a radical action—he brought back all of the company’s furloughed employees full time, with a twist.

“I decided we needed to do more in the community,” he says. “We changed our model of giving back, if you will, which had been writing a check when we could afford it. I had a hard time doing that when my own people had trouble buying groceries. I brought everyone back to work and said, ‘Let’s go out into the community. I’ll pay you to do that.’”

Williams’ employees each now spend up to four paid hours a week volunteering in the community. Some help out in their child’s classroom, others at the local food bank, and one employee with a passion for American history is helping a museum transcribe historical documents. Business has rebounded as well, but Williams is committed to allowing each employee four hours a week to volunteer in the community, even if work reaches capacity. While it’s too early to see how this plan will affect his business, he views it as an investment in his employees and the community they live in, as opposed to an expense.

“We’ve always had the idea around here that the purpose of the business was to bless the lives of our employees,” he says.

The article then moves on to highlight more traditional - and directly financially beneficial to those involved - relationships between businesses and their communities, but the Williams' business is something that deserves special consideration. In a world where so-called liberal democrats discuss if the latest round of tax breaks and incentives will give them the right combination of personal benefits to maybe hire, and so-called conservative capitalists discuss if the latest round of QE will this time move trillions or merely billions from the public coffers into their personal bank accounts - this family business took the bull by the horns and didn't even question if it was fair that everyone else would not be forced to invest in the community equally before embarking on their uplifting course of action.

They don't brag about it on their company web site and the only cross-link is to the snow-tube order page that directly benefits local charities in Grangeville.

Who among us, as business owners or workers, can say we have embodied that level of dedication in our service to community? I am very proud that my family businesses have always approached our employee relationships with similar underlying beliefs to those expressed. Even so, the decisions made at Idaho Sewing For Sports in empowering their employees and the wider community during difficult times, to me, provide an inspirational example. If actions really speak louder than words, this should be a 10,000 decibel megaphone.

The Residual Enterprises website alludes to a Christian foundation, but I don't have any idea of the politics that underlie these people's choices. To me this represents what I view as a libertarian ideal. But truly no ideology has a monopoly on self-initiated service to community, just as no ideology has a monopoly on caring about their fellow man and just as no ideology has a monopoly on a desire for profit. The choices made seem completely compatible with almost any basic ideological philosophy - when ideology is descibed by adherants rather than adversaries. Is this anti-Democrat? Anti-Republican? Socialism? Anti-Libertarian? The answer to all appears to be no. Every bit as much as OWS represents an important step in demaning a better policy approach, reimagining the basis of our relationships between business and community is crucial to finding a successful economic path forward.

Too often we choose the most petty and superficial points of debate. Weather distilling a lifetime of thought and public speaking into a handful of out-of-context quotes used as a foil to justify profanity-laced tirades directed at those who dare envision a different approach or a simple dismissal with a single-word epithet ... we are smothering in our own cocoons of self-righteous and self-important unchallengeable orthodoxy rather than engage concepts and accept the outcomes of debate on the merit of ideas as actually presented.

Does it really matter one iota if these people want to vote for Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama ... or someone else entirely? For just one day, can't we all agree that no matter what their politics - these people are simply a blessing to our nation?

Today I am grateful for contributions that Gail and Gunther Williams have made to our state, our nation and our business community ... and find myself inspired on a day when I truly expected no inspiration would come.

(originally posted at: kgblogz)