So what exactly is Thanksgiving? Is it a religious or a patriotic holiday? Is it about being thankful to God or the Tao or the Dharma, etc. for the good things in our lives, or is it about being grateful to Uncle Sam and the American political and economic system for all that it's hypothetically bestowed upon us? Or is Thanksgiving a somewhat amorphous and confused hybrid holiday, combining nationalism and nondenominational religiosity?
Well, I think that the last description is pretty much accurate. Thanksgiving is a day in which we're all supposed to suspend our disbelief in and shelve our criticisms of the system we live under and blithely buy into the happy and patriotic fictions of American democracy and capitalism. And we're supposed to do so largely on the basis of a vaguely faith-based sense of gratitude.
Thanksgiving is kind of like the Fourth of July with a dose of religion. It's a day to affirm and celebrate the myth of a great middle-class nation with a turkey in every pot, and to send up hosannas to Heaven for the blessing of being a part of such a rich society.
Okay, so what's so wrong with or distressing about having one day in the year in which we're collectively willfully naïve about the socio-economic realities of our society? And what's so dangerous about grounding this naiveté in the idea of a Santa Claus-like God who has seen fit to favor the United States?
At the risk of sounding like a Grinch of sorts I'll give a couple of reasons to be guarded about joining in on the spirit of Thanksgiving. First of all, even if it's only for one day out of 365, cosigning the cruel lie that capitalism American style is a blessing in itself, and that its bounty trickles down sufficiently to the working class and the poor (which more and more these days are synonymous) does a disservice to those who aren't really receiving their share of the pumpkin prosperity pie.
In case you're not one of them and haven't heard of them, there's a demographic group that's always been with us in this land of many blessings, and lately their numbers feel like they're growing geometrically, I mean the working poor. How about a holiday to expressly recognize their plight, rather than one to reinforce the patriotic, feel-good falsehood that this is a country of economically solvent and succeeding people. Thanksgiving, alas, is the latter, a day to be spent in the pleasant illusion that everyone who's willing to work is getting along well enough. Sure, we realize that we're in a recession right now and that many working folks are struggling, but on Thanksgiving we look on the delusional bright side and tell ourselves that life is still hunky-dory in the good ole USA.
And this is indeed a serious disservice and unkindness to the broke, debt-ridden, bankrupt, recently-foreclosed-on, down-and-out, and bereft-of-any-tangible-blessings-to-be-thankful-for neighbors and fellow working people who unjustly have to pay the price for the greed of the favored few at the top of the economic food chain. The major players of big business and finance have their ill-gotten billions to be thankful for, and the rest of us are supposed to embrace simpleminded positivity and be grateful for their crumbs!
By inculcating in us the big lie that America's abundance is spread around well enough that we all have much to be thankful for Thanksgiving is complicit in perpetuating the poverty, economic inequality and injustice, and suffering that are real aspects of a great many people's lives. Thanksgiving is not just a nice, uplifting holiday, it's a part of our socio-cultural indoctrination to not see, hear, and speak the evils of American capitalism, to remain in societal denial and complacently allow an unfair and uncompassionate status quo to continue. Thanksgiving as we know it under capitalism is unprogressive.
What else, what else is there to say against that sacred cow of a holiday we innocently call Thanksgiving? Well, there's also the way it mixes nationalism and religion, how about that. Aside from the fact that Thanksgiving traces back to the holier-than-thou Puritans, it most definitely has a religious dimension and flavor. A religious dimension that blurs into and fuses with its patriotic spirit. Thus does Thanksgiving help to promote nationalism, and to intensify it for some people with the emotional force of religion. Historically this has sometimes manifested in a messianic patriotism that has been use to justify and fire up the public for this country's wars.
What else is so disturbing about bigamously loving both God and country? Is it just a matter of valuing the separation of church and state? No, there's a bit more to it. Nationalism and spirituality shouldn't mix not only because it's politically dangerous, but because it's spiritually contraindicated as well. Spirituality ideally is about inclusively and transcendentally expanding our concept of our identity, expanding it to the point that we identify with the life and beauty and wonder of all of Creation. Spirituality should take our sense of self outside of our puny ego, ethnic, and national selves, to the deepest inner reaches of our nature where we realize our connection with everyone and everything. And this in turn brings everyone and thing into our circle of caring and empathy. Everyone becomes our brother and sister, i.e., consideration and compassion becomes appropriate for all our fellow human beings and life forms.
But nationalism, well, nationalism ignorantly works in a very different direction. Nationalism bogs our consciousness down in a small and separatist identity. Nationalism tells us that we're Portuguese, Dutch, American, etc., not a part of all reality, not brothers and sisters to every man, woman, child, and creature of the Earth. Nationalism to one degree or another isolates us from transcendence and from everyone who doesn't share our nationality. The spirit of nationalism and the spirit of spirituality are actually then quite anathema to each other and have no proper business mixing on Thanksgiving or any other day.
To mix them corrupts our understanding of the real nature of spirituality which not only sets back our spiritual growth, it also produces religions that serve the cultural function of indoctrinating people to accept and assimilate to their society and its status quo. Nationalized religions, so to speak, become instruments of a society's power structure, they're used to make the masses resign themselves to their lot in life, and to teach them to respect "authority" and do its bidding, even to the extreme of going off and dying in wars they have no stake in. And yes, harmless little ole Thanksgiving feeds into all of this!
Thanksgiving is not just about tradition and wholesomeness and appreciating what you have, it's about being trained to lower your critical intellectual defenses against the BS of our society, it's about seducing us to accept the flimflam of American capitalism and democracy in a spirit of patriotism and gratitude, it's about being conditioned to casually consent to the unofficial socio-economic hierarchy that's established itself in our "land of liberty" and even pay homage to it, and Thanksgiving is about bastardizing our spirituality with nationalism with both spiritually and politically negative consequences.
I won't even go off on a tangent here about how Thanksgiving whitewashes the crimes against Native Americans, the precedence for which was set by the same lovely Puritans who established the tradition of Thanksgiving. I'll simply sum up now and say once more that if we really take a critical look at it there's much about Thanksgiving that's profoundly disturbing. But of course most people are so conventional, patriotic, and attached to their culture and its holidays that they'll sweepingly and offhandedly dismiss all of above and continue to observe Thanksgiving with their usual sappy sentimentality.
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