Pardon The Interruption

 I waited a few days out of respect for everyone's digestive systems. Not that this entry is specifically disgusting, in any sort of visceral way. No, this is geared more toward your sensibilities rather than your sensitive tummies. 

Thanksgiving has come and gone. The big eating holiday. It's a feast. It's supposed to celebrate the moment in our history a year after the Pilgrims first came ashore and were welcomed to a big meal of corn and potatoes and the unluckiest bird on the planet. It was a gathering to share in all the abundance that the New World had to offer. The indigenous people who helped those immigrants survive for the first year never imagined how this whole thing would turn out. 

Imagine being a member of one of those tribes today, and seeing how that legendary show of hospitality all turned out. In 1637, sixteen years after that first big banquet, Massachusetts Bay Colony's governor John Winthrop declared a day of festive feeding. Not to commemorate that gathering back in Plymouth but to salute the massacre of hundreds of men, women and children of the Pequot tribe, burning their village to the ground. 

Happy Thanksgiving indeed. 

Four hundred and one years later, the victors continue to write the history books and celebrate their holidays. No matter what the real truth is, we continue to park ourselves in front of the biggest spread possible and gorge ourselves until the football is over. It's how we celebrate the escape of our ancestors from political and religious oppression. And eventually came to politically and religiously oppress the people who showed us how to grow corn. We gave them syphilis. 

Eventually, between the Spanish and those hearty souls who landed on Plymouth Rock, the people who were here first were all but extinguished from the continent. When I was a kid, my brothers and I would often recreate that very first Thanksgiving by having John Alden (me) shake hands with Squanto (my younger brother), directed by my older brother just behind the giant carboard cutout of a turkey. There was no back story for how Squanto was originally kidnapped by English explorer Thomas Hunt and sold into slavery in Spain. That would get in the way of the turkey. Not necessarily the cardboard kind. Which probably wouldn't keep us from eating it anyway. Which is what the day is all about. 

That and forgetting about how we all ended up at the table in the first place.