Thanksgiving, 2025

Thanksgiving again. Traditionally a holiday that celebrates the first feast between Pilgrims (I’ve begun to find the phrase ironic) and the Native peoples who it is said helped fee these early English settlers. Those settlers were Separatists—Puritans—who the legend tells left England to practice their religion. I learned this myth of the first Thanksgiving in school. It was told that the Wampanoag had helped the early Puritan settlers get through the previous winter by giving them food in that time of scarcity in exchange for an alliance with the Wampanoags and protection for them against the rival Narragansett tribe. The English had the guns. Wikipedia offers that “Historian David Silverman describes the myth of the First Thanksgiving in this way: "The myth is that friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear" Apparently, things did not occur in this harmonious fashion and history records that things afterwards did not go so well. King Philip's War, half a century later was the last-ditch effort by Native tribes to expel the colonists from New England who had consistently broken agreements and usurped the land. Many Native Americans see Thanksgiving as a Day of Mourning.

Thanksgiving again. This amidst wars about the world, government leaders across the globe eliminating rights and destroying democracies in unconscionably violent circumstances. Here, we are governed a serial liar and bully and his cowardly sycophants, soiled by a level of incivility that makes the streets and by-ways of the United States fouled and threatening. Some carry firearms, some Mace, and some employ their automobiles as weapons.Out there one cannot know who might be the enemy and caution keeps many inside. 

Fermina Daza considers in Gabriel Marquez’s Love in the time of Cholera that life in the world, which had caused her so much uncertainly before she was familiar with it, was “nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder.” I gather insight in Fermina’s observation. The empty words simply remind me how false in the sentiment: those banal ceremonies and preordained words merely show for avarice and self-aggrandizement. I have written over the years that these empty Days of Prayer declared by reputed leaders serve merely as a masquerade for real concern and a cover for inaction; these empty declarations of prayer shade against the horror. Walter Benjamin was certainly correct when he wrote that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the matter in which it was transmitted for one owner to another.” Benjamin cautions that it is necessary to learn to read history against the grain. Thanksgiving is not all it has been advertised as being. Its celebratory nature and spiritual affect covers over the travesty of what happened then and continues to be practiced today.

Thanksgiving again. And there still sits Arlo Guthrie on the Group W bench with all the father rapers. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. “Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly' n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage." Yes, most of us are left to pay our fines and pick up the garbage, but none of them that serve miss a breakfast.