Leftists ruin Thanksgiving

Quote Originally Posted by RyszardKuklinski View Post
Lol, Thanksgiving is sort of silly that we eat more to be thankful.

But, I see nothing inherently evil about it, either.

actually, Thanksgiving is not silly.......but you are silly if you think it's about eating more.......that's about as stupid as saying Christmas is about giving and getting presents........
 
Leftists themselves, not having a problem with seeing history in perspective, seem to enjoy it just fine.

Is that so?

Let's Cancel Thanksgiving

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lets-cancel-thanksgiving_b_8600224

Happy National Genocide (Thanksgiving) Day!

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/thanksgiving-pequot-massacre_b_4337722

Native Americans Mourn On Thanksgiving

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/huffpost-reports-no-thanks-given_n_5a15d369e4b0859b3dffcd6c

WHY SOME NATIVE AMERICANS IN CINCINNATI OBSERVE A DAY OF MOURNING ON THANKSGIVING

https://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/article/why-some-native-americans-in-cincinnati-observe-a-day-of-mourning-on-thanksgiving/

Marking a Different Thanksgiving Tradition, From West Africa

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/dining/liberian-american-thanksgiving-west-africa.html
 
Why should we care about stories over 250 years ago that were questionable then and less dependable now? Surprise people. there is no Santa Claus either.

you shouldn't......you should care about stories that are 2000 years old and have never been questionable.......
 
I doubt right-wingers came up with this gem

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'leaningright' said Native Americans were not offended by Thanksgiving. Said they promoted it. (I think his claim was that he is part Choctaw)

Ok, let’s get it correct if we’re going to reference what I said. I believe it was that “most of us of Native heritage celebrate Thanksgiving.” I said nothing about promoting it but did post the video of my chief and assistant chief giving their Thanksgiving message from a few years ago. If you want to see this year and last year on Facebook videos here are the links:

https://www.facebook.com/ChiefGaryBatton/videos/1092483177857226/

https://www.facebook.com/choctawnationofoklahoma/videos/611005230101382/
 
Ok, let’s get it correct if we’re going to reference what I said. I believe it was that “most of us of Native heritage celebrate Thanksgiving.” I said nothing about promoting it but did post the video of my chief and assistant chief giving their Thanksgiving message from a few years ago. If you want to see this year and last year on Facebook videos here are the links:

https://www.facebook.com/ChiefGaryBatton/videos/1092483177857226/

https://www.facebook.com/choctawnationofoklahoma/videos/611005230101382/

Thanks for the clarification. I did my best to remember the gist of your posting. :)
 
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Autumn is the season for Native America. There are the cool nights and warm days of Indian summer and the genial query “What’s Indian about this weather?”

More wearisome is the annual fight over the legacy of Christopher Columbus—a bold explorer dear to Italian-American communities, but someone who brought to this continent forms of slavery that would devastate indigenous populations for centuries.

Football season is in full swing, and until recently the team in the nation’s capital reveled each week in a racist performance passed off as “just good fun.”

As baseball season closes, one prays that Atlanta (or even semi-evolved Cleveland) will not advance to the World Series.

Next up is Halloween, typically featuring “Native American Brave” and “Sexy Indian Princess” costumes.

November brings Native American Heritage Month and tracks a smooth countdown to Thanksgiving. In the elementary-school curriculum, the holiday traditionally meant a pageant, with students in construction-paper headdresses and Pilgrim hats reënacting the original celebration. If today’s teachers aim for less pageantry and a slightly more complicated history, many students still complete an American education unsure about the place of Native people in the nation’s past—or in its present. Cap the season off with Thanksgiving, a turkey dinner, and a fable of interracial harmony. Is it any wonder that by the time the holiday arrives a lot of American Indian people are thankful that autumn is nearly over?

Americans have been celebrating Thanksgiving for nearly four centuries, commemorating that solemn dinner in November, 1621. We know the story well, or think we do. Adorned in funny hats, large belt buckles, and clunky black shoes, the Pilgrims of Plymouth gave thanks to God for his blessings, demonstrated by the survival of their fragile settlement. The local Indians, supporting characters who generously pulled the Pilgrims through the first winter and taught them how to plant corn, joined the feast with gifts of venison.

A good time was had by all, before things quietly took their natural course: the American colonies expanded, the Indians gave up their lands and faded from history, and the germ of collective governance found in the Mayflower Compact blossomed into American democracy.

Almost none of this is true, as David Silverman points out in “This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving” (Bloomsbury). The first Thanksgiving was not a “thanksgiving,” in Pilgrim terms, but a “rejoicing.” An actual giving of thanks required fasting and quiet contemplation; a rejoicing featured feasting, drinking, militia drills, target practice, and contests of strength and speed. It was a party, not a prayer, and was full of people shooting at things. The Indians were Wampanoags, led by Ousamequin (often called Massasoit, which was a leadership title rather than a name). An experienced diplomat, he was engaged in a challenging game of regional geopolitics, of which the Pilgrims were only a part. While the celebrants might well have feasted on wild turkey, the local diet also included fish, eels, shellfish, and a Wampanoag dish called nasaump, which the Pilgrims had adopted: boiled cornmeal mixed with vegetables and meats. There were no potatoes (an indigenous South American food not yet introduced into the global food system) and no pies (because there was no butter, wheat flour, or sugar).

Nor did the Pilgrims extend a warm invitation to their Indian neighbors. Rather, the Wampanoags showed up unbidden. And it was not simply four or five of them at the table, as we often imagine. Ousamequin, the Massasoit, arrived with perhaps ninety men—more than the entire population of Plymouth. Wampanoag tradition suggests that the group was in fact an army, honoring a mutual-defense pact negotiated the previous spring. They came not to enjoy a multicultural feast but to aid the Pilgrims: hearing repeated gunfire, they assumed that the settlers were under attack. After a long moment of suspicion (the Pilgrims misread almost everything that Indians did as potential aggression), the two peoples recognized one another, in some uneasy way, and spent the next three days together.

No centuries-long continuity emerged from that 1621 meet-up. New Englanders certainly celebrated Thanksgivings—often in both fall and spring—but they were of the fasting-and-prayer variety. Notable examples took place in 1637 and 1676, following bloody victories over Native people. To mark the second occasion, the Plymouth men mounted the head of Ousamequin’s son Pumetacom above their town on a pike, where it remained for two decades, while his dismembered and unburied body decomposed.

The less brutal holiday that we celebrate today took shape two centuries later, as an effort to entrench an imagined American community. In 1841, the Reverend Alexander Young explicitly linked three things: the 1621 “rejoicing,” the tradition of autumnal harvest festivals, and the name Thanksgiving. He did so in a four-line throwaway gesture and a one-line footnote. Of such half thoughts is history made.

A couple of decades later, Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, proposed a day of unity and remembrance to counter the trauma of the Civil War, and in 1863 Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November to be that national holiday, following Young’s lead in calling it Thanksgiving.

After the Civil War, Thanksgiving developed rituals, foodways, and themes of family—and national—reunion.

Only later would it consolidate its narrative around a harmonious Pilgrim-Wampanoag feast, as Lisa Blee and Jean O’Brien point out in “Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit” (North Carolina), which tells the story of how the holiday myth spread. Fretting over late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigration, American mythmakers discovered that the Pilgrims, and New England as a whole, were perfectly cast as national founders: white, Protestant, and blessed with an American character centered on family, work, individualism, freedom, and faith.

The new story aligned neatly with the defeat of American Indian resistance in the West and the rising tide of celebratory regret that the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo once called “imperialist nostalgia.”

Glorifying the endurance of white Pilgrim founders diverted attention from the brutality of racial violence, and downplayed the foundational role of African slavery.

The fable also allowed its audience to avert its eyes from the marginalization of Asian and Latinx labor populations, the racialization of Southern European and Eastern European immigrants, and the rise of eugenics. At Thanksgiving, white New England cheerfully shoved the problematic South and West off to the side, and claimed America for itself.

The challenge for scholars attempting to rewrite Thanksgiving is the challenge of confronting an ideology that has long since metastasized into popular history. Silverman begins his book with a plea for the possibility of a “critical history.” It will be “hard on the living,” he warns, because this approach questions the creation stories that uphold traditional social orders, making the heroes less heroic, and asking readers to consider the villains as full and complicated human beings. Nonetheless, he says, we have an obligation to try.

So how does one take on a myth? One might begin by deconstructing the process through which it was made. Silverman sketches a brief account of Hale, Lincoln, and the marketing of a fictionalized New England. Blee and O’Brien reveal how proliferating copies of a Massasoit statue, which we can recognize as not so distant kin to Confederate monuments, do similar cultural work, linking the mythic memory of the 1621 feast with the racial, ethnic, and national-identity politics of 1921, when the original statue was commissioned.

One might also wield the historian’s skills to tell a “truer,” better story that exposes the myth for the self-serving fraud that it is. Silverman, in doing so, resists the temptation to offer a counter-myth, an ideological narrative better suited to the contemporary moment, and renders the Wampanoags not simply as victims but as strugglers, fighting it out as they confront mischance and aggression, disagreeing with one another, making mistakes, displaying ambition and folly, failing to see their peril until it is too late.

In the story that many generations of Americans grew up hearing, there were no Wampanoags until the Pilgrims encountered them. If Thanksgiving has had no continuous existence across the centuries, however, the Wampanoag people have. Today, they make up two federally recognized tribes, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head :rofl2:, and they descend from a confederation of groups that stretched across large areas of Massachusetts, including Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket.


https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/25/the-invention-of-thanksgiving
 
Thomas Jefferson is on the outs.

Columbus Day is a shadow of its former self.

And Thanksgiving, perhaps most consequently, is under pressure.

If this American holiday is ever downgraded from its honored place on the national calendar, it will speak of a profound change in our self-definition.

Thanksgiving dates from before the establishment of the American nation-state and harkens back to our original settlers. Although the official holiday was formally established by a Republican in 1863 (during the armed insurrection by DEMOCRATS), it has acquired its layers of meaning through informal culinary and social customs, and a centuries-old vein of tradition.

For many Americans, the day still functions as the great 19th-century promoter of the holiday, Sarah Josepha Hale, hoped it would. “Such social rejoicings,” she wrote in 1857, “tend greatly to expand the generous feelings of our nature, and strengthen the bond of union that binds us brothers and sisters in that true sympathy of American patriotism.”

If that ever stops being so, we will be a different country and poorer for it.


https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/thanksgiving-must-endure/
 
Deprogram your relatives this Thanksgiving

https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/wait-what/619e50cedce0f300208d7288/deprogram-your-relatives-this-thanksgiving/
 
Can Covid Winter Be Merry and Bright? We Asked the Experts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/opinion/covid-thanksgiving-holiday-risk.html
 
Debunking Conservative Myths This Thanksgiving

https://www.democracydocket.com/news/debunking-conservative-myths-this-thanksgiving/
 
The culture war doesn’t take Thanksgiving week off, and its attackers aren’t big on giving thanks, anyway.

The illiberal left wants to radically transform an inherently evil America that was founded on slavery and colonialism.

On Tuesday, the Women’s March issued an apology for sending out an email noting that their average donation this week had been $14.92. “It was an oversight on our part to not make the connection to a year of colonization, conquest, and genocide for Indigenous people, especially before Thanksgiving,” they said. This is stupidity that defies satire.

Meanwhile, MSNBC recently invited writer Gyasi Ross to talk about the “mythology” of Thanksgiving. “Instead of bringing stuffing and biscuits, those settlers brought genocide and violence,” he said. “That genocide and violence is still on the menu as state-sponsored violence against Native and Black Americans is commonplace. And violent private white supremacy is celebrated and subsidized.”

I get it! I get it! America sucks. And you need to be constantly reminded of that. We can’t possibly have a day where we put aside the culture wars and just celebrate the blessings we have been given, right?

Don’t even think about celebrating Columbus Day, President’s Day, or Thanksgiving Day without a proper finger-wagging lecture, just to make sure any lingering patriotism is replaced by guilt and shame. Enjoy your stuffing, you white supremacist scumbags!

The Rosses of the world don’t want you to celebrate America’s history or traditions because the whole damn thing is tainted and conceived in sin. The National Broadcasting Company apparently endorses this worldview, since MSNBC aired this segment and proudly tweeted about it.

A good argument could be made that few Americans gathering to give thanks for their blessings are thinking primarily about Pilgrims and Native Americans. But even to the degree that the first Thanksgiving has become embedded in the American psyche, things are (as usual) more complicated.

Here’s a short summation of what we know. In 1620, a group of English settlers known as the Pilgrims made an arduous journey across the Atlantic. In 1621, they signed a peace treaty with the Indigenous people living in the area that was honored by both sides for fifty years. Native Americans taught the settlers about how to fertilize the soil for growing crops, and also gave them hunting and fishing tips. This was vital to the Plymouth colony’s survival. Later that year, there was a feast to celebrate their first autumn harvest. This became known as the first Thanksgiving.

It’s a true story that offers us hope, and one that almost everyone could be proud of celebrating, unless they're a leftist.

Of course, there’s another story. There’s the story of how the treaty broke down when new arrivals of Europeans and subsequent generations of Indigenous people clashed, and later, there’s the story of a horrific genocide of Native Americans during America’s westward expansion.

And then, there’s another story.

The story of how Abraham Lincoln decided to declare a national day of thanksgiving during the Civil War, and how the nation he preserved would later free the world from Nazi domination, thus bringing more freedom and prosperity to more people than any force in the history of the world.

We should know the whole story, but which story defines us as a nation?

Here’s the problem.

I’m not sure a nation that views itself as shameful and bloodthirsty oppressors whose country is awash in racism can prevail over competing value systems.

Let’s not kid ourselves.

Every nation has done horrific things. Few progressives are outraged by the atrocities currently being committed against ethnic minorities, gays, and women by the Chinese Communists, the Taliban, or anyone else.

Progressives should consider that their constant undermining of America fosters the rise of a repressive regime that will end up ruling them before too long, but they don't.

Would the world really be better off if Red China’s values became dominant?

Empirically speaking, there’s no better time or place to be alive than in 21st century America.

We are freer, safer, and healthier than any people in the history of the world. We enjoy many leisure hours each week. And ironically, this gives us more time to dwell on how horrible we are and how bad we have it.

“To my mind, conservatism is gratitude", says Yuval Levin. “Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it. Never forget what moves us to gratitude, and so what we stand for and defend: the extraordinary cultural inheritance we have; the amazing country built for us by others and defended by our best and bravest; America’s unmatched potential for lifting the poor and the weak; the legacy of freedom—of ordered liberty—built up over centuries of hard work.”

A healthy country is transparent about its past sins. We should never present a sanitized version of history. But we also must be proud of our past that was a force for good, because it happens to be true—and because we can then strive to live up to that.

When many Americans believe the nation is defined by its sins rather than its beneficence—as is happening now—it seems to me that our goose (er, turkey) is cooked.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-war-on-thanksgiving-is-america-at-its-worst?ref=author
 
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