Happy Thanksgiving to everyone reading and to your families!!!
There should be two components of Thanksgiving, I feel: the “meal day” component and the “commemorate the invasion and conquest of a people, a commemoration duly masked by the myth of a shared meal symbolizing eternal friendship between two peoples” component. Let’s separate those two, where we commemorate the evil on the first day by buying a live turkey, “befriending” it (like giving it some kind of name) and integrating it into our lives in some basic way. Then we kill it and process it, and a week later we have “meal day.” We are somber because of the necessary sacrifice of the bird, symbolizing the land that we have inherited and that we’re using with no serious intention of giving it up and like returning to our continent of ancestral origin. But the quality of the meal and the togetherness of family will remind us that despite the dark, bloodstained quality of our shared history, we can’t think about this, and we must gather together around wonderful scalloped potatoes and pumpkin pie and yams with marshmallows stuck in them, because the present and whatever luxuries we can afford are all we have.
This is my Thanksgiving wish for all of us: that we will befriend turkeys that we have to kill, and that this will bring us all together.
Again: HAPPY THANKSGIVING