Still hate Thanksgiving

I managed to wait until the day after Thanksgiving to post this post.

I don't like Thanksgiving. I prefer my holidays, how do I say this? Genocide free. I don't think there's any need to have holidays with the specter of genocide over them.

Some people will try to argue that isn't the case. I think that's nonsense. The historical associations are clear. We all know the story of those Plymouth settlers who were helped by those friendly Indians to survive the hard winters. We have seen it in a dozen pageants as children and we are certainly bombarded with those images via the media.

the United American Indians of New England, the actual descendants of those helpful Indians, call this, instead, the National Day of Mourning. The effects of the racism of the colonists are present in these communities to this day. If there's a more discriminated group of people in the United States, I don't know who they are – but I do know that American Indians are insufficiently educated, face massive unemployment, poverty (with all the attendant ills that go along with it) and repression (an American Indian is about twelve times as likely to be a felon as a white person in the United States). Thanksgiving is a mockery of the incredible suffering that those colonists caused the Indians and that the United States continues to cause.

Quite frankly, it has all the taste that Germans putting their national day of thanksgiving on the dates of the Krystallnacht. It would clearly be offensive and they would have the sense not to do it.

People might also want to argue that it's a convenient day to spend time with family members. This is true. But so what? The idea that convenience is almighty is . . . the source of many of America and the world's ills. Your family can figure out some other day to see each other, for crying out loud. Considering how much effort goes into Thanksgiving, it'd be acceptable to spend a little time organizing.

People might also say that it isn't important enough to fight. Well, UAINE disagrees and I agree. The fashion of Thanksgiving is an insult to them and the history of the United States. We should have a National Day of Mourning, to remember what price has been paid so that we might, today, have this fabulously wealthy country. Our wealth has been bought with oceans of blood and suffering.

I, myself, would suggest that the family get together structure that is currently organized around Thanksgiving be organized, instead, around Martin Luther King Day. Now he's an American! Though flawed, as humans are, he spent the greater part of his life to fight for freedom, peace, an end to racism and poverty – he gave his life for this cause. His life carries a positive message, a great message, even, and I can think of no American I respect more than Martin Luther King (with the possible exception of Thoreau).

However, most people won't even seriously consider this because, to most people, the very idea of it is absurd. Thanksgiving is . . . Thanksgiving. It has all this . . . tradition. Which is my point. If it was easy to abandon, it could be abandoned – but it's not easy to abandon and there are reasons behind this. But those reasons point back to the National Day of Mourning, they point back to Indians who helped the very colonists survive that would, in later years, kill them, chase them from their lands, put them into concentration camps, that they would be and still are a colonized people. (Not even post-colonial – Indians in America are still completely caught up in colonialism.) The reason we hold onto this holiday is tradition and that tradition, I argue, continues to have meaning and continues to be an insult to the oppressed.