THANKFUL IS GOOD
And . . .
so is history
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.. The bare historic bones of the first Thanksgiving are simple enough. A traditional puritan harvest celebration with neighbors. It took 250 years for it to become a national holiday - end of bare bones!.. Beyond that bare bones history there comes a pile of erroneous mythology and contemporary historiography that amounts to the worst sort of revisionist history - just ask a 6th grader about it.
.. Three historical facts that must be kept in mind: 1) Thanksgiving was not the beginning of a long friendship between the Pilgrims and the indigenous people, 2) The settlers did not respected the indigenous peoples' unique culture or religion, 3) The interlopers learned successful agricultural practices from the indigenous people.
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| IT'S A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE |
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.. We are thankful, today, about our present situation in this veil of mortal tears. We are also aware of the ramifications of Europeans entering he Americas... The blood lust for riches and, the myriad underpinnings of competing religiosity swept through the two continents more rapidly and more thoroughly than any wildfire.
.. All told: hundreds of indigenous cultures were destroyed. Over 100,000,000 native Americans were killed in a matter of less than 200 years, -- (it continues to this day.)
.. As a nation we are righteously indignant about the events of 9/11. Rightly so. We are less concerned about the genocide in our history: so much so that the frontier massacres are glorified.
.. We, indeed, are thankful for today. Yet, today we are sad, embarrassed, revolted and, unhappily aware of the dark history of genocide and slavery that our thanksgiving is based on. We can not fix our nation's past sins. We can, on the other hand, be thankful that we can make our current life one that is informed by the past.
EXCELLENT RESOURCE
>> Teaching a Lot of Misconceptions
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.. For the first time in over a decade we are doing a turkey for Thanksgiving. We really prefer ham or a rib roast. But the pressure of the neighborhood and it's residents have prevailed upon our oven. We have all the implements of destruction for the task. We even have a 50 year old speckled porcelain roasting pan. .. As the fowl thaws we are in the throes of a crucial debate -- to truss or not to truss, that is the question. More to come.
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| THE SIMPLE ALCHEMY OF TIME AND TECHNIQUE |