Giving Thanks for What and to Whom?

 I've been ambivalent about Thanksgiving for a long time.  Thanksgiving - in my experience - is a time when family and friends come together, consider and give thanks for their blessings, and enjoy each other's company.

But then there's all that stuff about Pilgrims in Plymouth.  If any of the basic story is true, the European immigrants essentially came to North America, were helped to survive their first difficult winter, and then went on to decimate their hosts and take over the land.  Not a good basis for a holiday of thanksgiving.

And then there's all that poultry that's cooped up, butchered, frozen, and shipped to supermarkets, raising questions about how healthy the meat is and how humanitarian the turkeys are treated.  I focused on that two years ago.

About two weeks ago, a friend sent me an article called  "How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving And Learned To Be Afraid"  by Robert Jensen.  Here are some excerpts. 

The whole piece can be found here. 

In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that "hate" is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture. . .

Although it's well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the "encounter" between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. . .

He's enjoying his righteous indignation a bit too much I think.  After all, can't we make this day of thanksgiving mean whatever we want it to mean?  From his perspective, and this is the part I have to think about seriously..

Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don't define holidays individually or privately -- the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can't pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

He certainly likes that refrain. . . intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.  Phil, can you put that to music?

As I said above, I have qualms about Thanksgiving, but his claims to own the truth here and call people who disagree names seems disingenuous too.  And he never even mentions the killing of all the turkeys every year.

The way he puts it, it seems we have only a couple of options:  Keep on being hypocrites or abandon Thanksgiving.  Possibly there's a third option - some official decoupling Thanksgiving from the story of the pilgrims.  I'd argue that that can happen gradually as more and more people do that in their personal celebrations - consciously talk about the new meaning of Thanksgiving at their dinners.
 

I'm planning to partake in Thanksgiving, remembering the good things of this year and of my life and offering thanks.  But I'm also going to remember  that a sentient creature was sacrificed so that we might eat.  We may even find some alternative to a turkey one day. And if this day of giving thanks is based on pilgrims whose descendants took everything from the descendants of their hosts, then we must contemplate that too while we eat.  We can't change what happened, but we can live our lives in ways that prevent things like that from happening on our watch.