Autumn is one of the best times of the year. Between the assortment of holidays, to the changing of leaves, and breaking out the UGGs for the first time, it’s hard not to relish in every part of the season. But I hate Thanksgiving. I don’t hate Thanksgiving for the reasons you might think. If you’ve ever talked about how much you love gravy or stuffing, chances are I’ve drowned you out.
Is it
because you’re vegetarian? Is it because you hate your family? Is it because
you don’t understand football? Those are the questions I have received
concerning my hatred towards Thanksgiving. No, it’s not because I’m vegetarian
(but very good guess), no, it’s not because I hate my family, and no,
it’s not because I don’t understand football (I understand the Patriots
need to win so I can get free iced coffee).
I hate the
history of Thanksgiving. What we are taught in elementary school is not what led to
Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving has a treacherous, heinous, and disgusting history.
Let us pause for a moment of reflection. Christopher Columbus did not colonize
the Americas, he destroyed it.
Between 1494 and 1508, more than three million Native Americans died from war, disease, and slavery. It is also reported that Columbus completely tolerated the raping and pillaging of Natives when he and his crew first arrived in the southern part of the Americas in the Caribbean.
Historian Lewis Mumford is noted for saying, “Wherever Western man went, slavery, land robbery, lawlessness,
culture-wrecking, and the outright extermination of both wild beasts and tame
men went with him.”
The first Thanksgiving, celebrated
in what now is Connecticut in 1621, did not involve both white European
settlers and Native Americans. There is no written documentation of the history
of Thanksgiving, which leaves historians and Native Americans skeptical. By
this time in history, Native Americans, specifically the Pequot tribe in Connecticut, were dying of European
diseases and only about 19 percent of its original tribe survived.
Thanksgiving is not about giving thanks and being
grateful and it never was. Even if today’s 21st century way of
thinking of Thanksgiving is still ostentatious as we stuff ourselves with
hormone-induced turkey and canned cranberry sauce, the holiday is not what we
have been taught. Today the holiday is about too much food, and spending too
much time with family.