Hating Thanksgiving

It wouldn't be Thanksgiving without turkey, long lines, and people browsing their phones for Black Friday deals in which the products had their prices raised by 80% and then cut by 80% before being stealthily replaced by Amazon with identical looking Chinese knockoffs.

And it also wouldn't be Thanksgiving without the media launching another round of shots in its endless war on America with 'explainers' claiming that the Pilgrims were racist and that we should be ashamed of the holiday.

(Axios even managed to slander Sarah Josepha Hale, an abolitionist who helped make Thanksgiving a national holiday (and wrote 'Mary had a Litte Lamb') by accusing her of racism.)

After a week of agonizing over why America hates them and rejected their candidate, the media returned once more as a dog to its vomit to despising everything American and trying to destroy it.

The point of the Thanksgiving story is not what eventually happened between the pilgrims and some of the local Indian tribes (even less so whatever Hale thought about having black people colonize Liberia, a popular cause at the time and one that black nationalists began flirting again with Africanization during the black power movement), it's that two groups were able to set aside their conflicts, eat together and show gratitude.

It's a point even more important at a time when the media repeatedly encourages conflicts over Thanksgiving dinner and some children are refusing to visit their parents for Thanksgiving over election resentments.

Gratitude is important, but it's also the context of that gratitude. Thanksgiving is about gratitude to the Creator, but it's also about finding a point of harmony with our fellow men for at least a brief period.

That's also what Armistice Day (now Veteran's Day) and Memorial Day (originally Decoration Day) were about.

Some of our crucial holidays were about finding brotherhood and fellowship in the face of conflict. Thanksgiving brought together Pilgrims and Indians, Memorial Day, families of the fallen on both sides of the Civil War, and Veteran's Day marked a time when the guns stopped firing and Americans, English, French, Germans and Austria-Hungarians could come together. (My grandfather, who was a doctor on the Austria-Hungarian side, used that time to provide emergency medical aid to an 'enemy soldier' on the other side of the lines.)

It's the people who most need this message who also seem least able to take it in.

Leftists politicize everything and therefore they cannot coexist with anyone which is why Thanksgiving has to be yet another extension of the culture wars, dividing up families and the entire nation.

And as for gratitude, that requires finding the good and then thanking a higher power for it. Not only do few lefties believe in any such power, but gratitude requires putting aside the resentments that fuel the movement.

Like petulant teenagers, leftists triumphantly argue that the past was not perfect. As if anyone or anything is.

The point of gratitude and fellowship is not that anyone or anything is perfect, but that in an imperfect world, we can stop to appreciate what we have and to appreciate each other. What sworn enemies were able to do for centuries, leftists seem unable to do today. Immersed in comfort and shared values, they cannot do what worn and hungry men on the verge of losing their lives were able to do for the last four hundred years.

America needs gratitude and fellowship now more than ever. And it needs a people capable of it.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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