NO THANKS Giving

  No Thanksgiving? Boo-fucking- hoo. Any remedial student of history with tell you how fucked up the very idea of a Thanksgiving holiday is in America. The Thanksgiving myth starts with sickness and a massacre, not dinner and a football game. Everybody knows the alternative facts of buckled shoes, Pilgrim hats and smiling Indians. Ha! That's a joke. Just like today, Thanksgiving started with a pandemic:  

From the Internet: 

    The story began in 1614 when a band of English explorers sailed home to  England with a ship full of Patuxet Indians bound for slavery. They left behind smallpox which virtually wiped out those who had escaped.  By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay they found only one living Patuxet Indian, a man named Squanto who had survived slavery in England and knew their language.  He taught them to grow corn and to fish, and negotiated a peace treaty between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Nation. At the end of their first year, the Pilgrims held a great feast honoring Squanto and the Wampanoags.

So far so good.

      But as word spread in England about the paradise to be found in the new world, religious zealots called Puritans began arriving by the boat load. Finding no fences around the land, they considered it to be in the public domain. Joined by other British settlers, they seized land, capturing strong young Natives for slaves and killing the rest.  But the Pequot Nation had not agreed to the peace treaty Squanto had negotiated and they fought back. The Pequot War was one of the bloodiest Indian wars ever fought. 

    In 1637 near present day  Groton, Connecticut, over 700 men, women and children of the Pequot Tribe had gathered for their annual Green Corn Festival which is our Thanksgiving celebration. In the predawn hours the sleeping Indians were surrounded by English and Dutch mercenaries who ordered them to come outside.  Those who came out were shot or clubbed to death while the terrified women and children who huddled inside the longhouse were burned alive. The next day the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared “A Day Of Thanksgiving” because 700 unarmed men, women and children had been murdered.

    Ok. That's the first official Thanksgiving myth. The next load of bullshit would come when the 'mericans drove the Brits out of NY. On that day a Revolutionary War soldier from Walden, NY by the name of John Van Arsdale nailed roofing nails through the soles of his boots, and climbed the greased flag pole at the southern tip of Manhattan--still flying the Union Jack-- removed the flag and struck the red, white and blue of "Old Glory," as the British ships (loaded with escaped slaves) sailed for Nova Scotia. This was the second incarnation of the Thanksgiving holiday. 

From Wikipedia:

     Before it was a national holiday, Thanksgiving was proclaimed at various dates by state governors – as early as 1847, New York held Thanksgiving on the same date as Evacuation Day, a convergence happily noted by Walt Whitman, writing in the Brooklyn Eagle. The observance of the date was also diminished by the Thanksgiving Day Proclamation by 16th President Abraham Lincoln on October 3, 1863, that called on Americans "in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving."^[62] That year, Thursday fell on November 26. In later years, Thanksgiving was celebrated on or near the 25th, making Evacuation Day redundant.

  That would make three "official" reasons to give thanks- killing Indians, killing the Brits and killing  those living south of the Mason/Dixon line. So NO THANKS  to Thanksgiving this year. Give the whole bloody mythology a rest. Stay home. Hug your loved one. Get stuffed. Eat turkey or venison. Get high and fuck- Thanksgiving. It's redundant.