Who's Afraid of Thanksgiving?

There are two annual traditions that make up Thanksgiving. One is the ancient and venerable tradition of thanking the Creator for our bounty while the other is the more recent leftist tradition of turning the day into a festival of grievances, a 'festivus' during which they pick political arguments with family members and launch into screeds about how Thanksgiving is the product of imperialism and colonialism.

The Nation magazine recently proposed replacing it with a 'Truthsgiving' during which we will all confess our crimes and ponder how much better life would be if the Pilgrims had never come to America, and the Nazis and Communists had won WWII and gone on to exterminate 70% of the population of the planet.

Wrecking Thanksgiving, like the family, womens' sports and Star Wars is just one of those things lefties do. The perpetual teenage tantrums that began with Karl Marx and ended with Cousin Jan screaming at the Thanksgiving table about how nobody understands Hamas and how inspiring she found Osama bin Laden's letter are the essence of the movement.

The idea of Thanksgiving is scary to a movement obsessed with power and grievance. The essence of the holiday is gratitude and that requires taking a step back and acknowledging the limitations of our power. From the environment of the planet to every detail of our lives, the Left is obsessed with control, but Thanksgiving, like most religious festivals, is about surrendering that control to a higher power. G-d.

True people of faith are humble. Thanksgiving requires humility and the recognition that we are not ultimately in charge. While we can and should strive, we cannot do everything, and our successes are owed to a force that utterly transcends us and our efforts. But to believe that is to reject most of the objectives of the Left.

The utopian conviction that the purpose of life is to study politics and take power is a poisonous secular religion, more akin to Islam, than to Christianity and Judaism, whose fixation on power stems from the desire, as George Soros and other leftist billionaires have admitted, to play god. And to play god, is to deny that there is an actual Deity, only a chaotic world that has to be ordered by god-like humans.

There's no room for gratitude for the aspiring man-gods, the cults of personality, the mean and cheap little substitutes for religion that speak of love, but preach only hate.

The Left rejects gratitude. As Stalin said, "Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs." Resentment is what gives the Left purpose. The more leftists receive, the more they resent. Their resentment is in inverse proportion to their bounty. That is why Western leftists are the most resentful of them all.

Rather than fleeing blessed by prosperity and comfort, they grow arrogant and certain of themselves. The blessings around feed their egos and inflate their narcissism and stir up neuroses so that they alternate between ecstasies of power and catastrophes of doom. They imagine a new world and break the old one.

Gratitude is an antidote to arrogance, it is one of the best defenses against leftism. Teach your children gratitude and you give them a knowledge of G-d, a sense of security and their place in the universe.

Teach them leftism and you teach them to scream at you across the Thanksgiving table.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.