False narratives: Thanksgiving edition

Heard on this morning's news that the U.S. economy is doing better than expected...but then again, what did you expect the government to report? Heading blindly into another Black Friday spending flurry, they want the sheeplike masses to trample each other into the slaughterhouse...sorry, I meant Walmart/Macy's/insert big box store here.

And kicking off this crazy spend-fest is the Thanksgiving Holiday. So spend a few minutes with family being grateful for all you have, then rush headlong into every retailer to grab up a bunch of crap you (and your loved ones) don't need. You're in luck, too, because many of these greed merchants open their doors on Thursday, so you don't have to wait for the real reason for the season. Black Friday has become the black hole on the soul of America.

But that's not what I wanted to address in today's Thanksgiving post. The holiday now overshadowed by the nation's spending spree is not really a holiday at all. This day of "thanks" for the bounty at harvest time actually bears roots older and across the Atlantic than the colonialist Pilgrims. And let's be clear, the picture painted on kindergarten walls across America, isn't anywhere CLOSE to the truth. In fact, the first celebration on American soil may have happened c.1619 in Virginia, nowhere close to Plymouth Rock!

If you research it, even the American tradition, has taken on several variants--from excitement over the British exit of the colonies (the original Brexit) to the salvation of the Union post-Civil War. This European harvest celebration was co-opted by Puritans, who made everything in life about religion, to be a moment to thank the Creator for that bounty. It was convenient to the nation's white leaders to then assimilate the story of the 17th century Pilgrims and their salvation by the Natives that first winter. They twisted that story around to become the Pilgrim's benevolence to the Natives, then packaged it as the first Thanksgiving and peddled it to school children. It's the story I grew up on. How quaint.

Leave it to the white men in power to rewrite the story as it suits them to paint their ancestors in the best possible light. I mean, our forebears were so gracious to the indigenous Americans. They have so much to be thankful for, don't they? Oh wait. They don't? They actually celebrate an anti-Thanksgiving called the Day of Mourning. That stands in stark contrast to the story I was told.

Just like Black Friday and the robust economy, the Thanksgiving Fable is just another bill of goods being sold to us.

Now, I'm not knocking the idea of gratitude, of thankfulness. These things are, indeed, virtues. But the premise for this holiday is bogus. We should make every day Thanksgiving Day! We don't need to buy some bill of goods that the men in power have sold us. Nor do we need to rush out tomorrow afternoon and SAVE HUNDREDS on our Christmas shopping! You can, in fact, save 100% of your hard-earned money by staying home and enjoying your family or some solitude.