What America Should Be Thankful For

Every Thanksgiving Day we are asked to bow our heads give thanks to God for all that we have. For many years I have wondered exactly what America as a nation has to be grateful for on Thanksgiving Day. Here’s a partial list I’ve identified.

·         We are thankful that the indigenous peoples who occupied the area now known as North America were susceptible to the many diseases carried by the first European invaders and died by the millions when exposed to them, leaving tribes throughout the continent weak and ineffectual defenders of their lands and peoples.

·         We are thankful for President Andrew Jackson, who intentionally violated the U.S. Constitution when he defied a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, seizing nearly seven hundred thousand square miles of indigenous tribal land stretching from the East Coast to the Mississippi River and beyond, forcibly removing hundreds of thousands of native peoples against their will (an early example of brutally efficient government-driven ethnic cleansing) to today’s Oklahoma, leaving behind little more than cultural misappropriation, offensive stereotypes, and ghost-like indigenous names: Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas.

·         We are thankful that our indigenous peoples, even the most hostile, were unlike the newly minted Americans, who proved themselves to be rapacious charlatans and skilled liars who used official treaties to coerce and swindle tribes of their land and livelihoods.

·         We are thankful for Congress that crafted hundreds of treaties with native tribes and then unilaterally broke them whenever it benefited greedy, land-demanding American settlers.

·         We are thankful that the huge stainless steel Arch in St. Louis, marking the Gateway to the West and memorializing Westward Expansion, reminds us that all the lands we now live on were once those of indigenous tribes we brutally shoved aside without compunction or twinge of conscience.

·         We are eternally thankful that the vast majority of Americans today identify the day after Thanksgiving only as Black Friday and not as the National American Indian Heritage Day it is officially because, to be brutally honest, a booming economy is hugely more important to Americans than honoring once savage redskins.

·         But, most of all, we are thankful that indigenous peoples did not recognize the enormous peril posed by the first Europeans who invaded their lands and never united as a collective dedicated to the merciless slaughter of the invaders.

Yes, dear Lord, we are eternally grateful for the many blessings you have bestowed on this great nation and offer our prayerful thanks. Now, let’s eat that fat turkey. And don’t forget to pass the cranberries. Burrrrrp.

Written on Thanksgiving evening, 11-22-18.