Today is Thanksgiving, a secular American holiday that
allows everyone to be thankful for what we have.
And some of my good friends have already alighted to the
Internet to denounce Thanksgiving as a celebration of genocide, saying that we
should feel shame for our place in the world given that our part of
civilization is based on the ruins of another.
If you’re in a comfortable enough place that you can cast
aspersions on your own history and doubt the validity of your own place in the
world, be thankful. Questioning your own past is a luxury afforded to the very
few.
Chances are, the people most vocal about denouncing the
colonization of the Western Hemisphere by Europeans are European Americans who
live with the benefits of this colonization every day. The overwhelming
majority of people in this hemisphere of the world should be very thankful for
the colonial policies of 1600s Europe; we wouldn’t be alive without them. Few
to none of us would exist without European settlement in the New World.
Unless you’re signing over all of your property to a needy
Native American and heading back to mother Europe, your reminders about the
suffering of indigenous Americans ring very hollow.
So eat up, enjoy, and be thankful you are alive in a land of
plenty that affords you the opportunity to denounce the people who did the
dirty work on your behalf.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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