See: Black Friday, Part One: “Any world that I’m welcome to … is better than the one I come from.”
Ever respectful of the cognitive dissonance associated with inconvenient hindsight, I decided to wait until the day after Thanksgiving to give vent to my contrarian instincts. Verily, there are two sides to every story.
You’ve already guessed what is coming. NA Health’s side of the story, which comes to us as sanitized as Ward Cleaver’s TV-land bedroom, can be perused here:
Remember the “Thanks” in Thanksgiving, by Healthblogger.
Thanksgiving is another wonderful holiday and yes it is another Holiday with a very strong Christian background.
According to this viewpoint, the Puritans and natives gathered for a quaint New England picnic, pausing from the consumption of corn chowder and non-alcoholic cranberry wine only to pray to respective deities for their continued prosperity and happiness.
Like the wishbone from yesterday’s turkey, the scene is hard to swallow. Here’s an excerpt from an alternative viewpoint. The link is to the updated 2004 article; scroll down for the original piece, quoted below, which appeared in 2003. Both essays are well worth reading.
‘Why I Hate Thanksgiving’, by Mitchel Cohen (and others).
What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. Literally millions of native peoples were slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl Marx would later call this “the primitive accumulation of capital.” These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.
All of this were the preconditions for the first Thanksgiving.
But what do you think? Does truth depend on the ease in which it is digested, or are other factors involved?
