Heather Christena Schmidt

Kill the turkey!  Kill it now!

Okay, that’s not really what I’m talking about, but then again maybe it is.  Every year, we Americans kill an unprecedented number of poor, innocent turkeys – bred and fattened up to feed our already-fattened bellies.  The average American will eat roughly three times their daily caloric intake on Thanksgiving in honor of a holiday many do not even know the meaning behind (28% surveyed actually have an ‘idea’ of it, according to recent polling).  So here’s a little history lesson for all you over-indulgers out there.  Possibly you will think twice before shoveling more mashed potatoes and dinner rolls down your gullet in “thanks” for everything we have here:

There was no actual Thanksgiving feast with the Native Americans and the original white settlers on the fourth Thursday in November, in the context we celebrate it now.  All those plays you did in elementary school where the pilgrims and Indians broke bread in communion are full of shit, at least in regards to the Thanksgiving feast we have now.  The Thanksgiving we have now originated in 1863 – that is over two centuries after the pilgrims first settled in Jamestown.  It was declared by President Lincoln to be a celebration of our glorious nation, toward the end of the Civil War.  That pilgrim and Indian thing was actually the “First Thanksgiving,” which we do not celebrate and is in absolutely no accordance with the fourth Thursday in November.

The First Thanksgiving was a meal between Native Americans and pilgrims, but was a tradition brought over from England giving thanks to God for a healthy crop, and happened multiple times per year at random.  It also likely had no goddamned turkey on the table, that being a rare delicacy to the European settlers until later integration with the Native Americans occurred.  (And by integration I of course mean complete take-over by the settlers.)

Christopher Columbus was a fucking asshole.  Seriously, the guy was a murderer and a slave driver; he in essence began a long series of Anglo-Saxon oppressions on the Native Americans.  To be clear, what the European settlers did to the Native American people was genocide.  For years we were taught that Thanksgiving is a time when we are thankful to the Indian people for showing us their ways and helping us survive in an uncharted land.  The truth, though, is that we are thankful for being clever enough to kill off the majority of the Indian people with blankets covered in the small pox virus so that one day we would be able to segregate them into restricted areas, leaving us the vast remainder stolen land.

A celebration in thanks of God for a good crop has not a goddamned thing to do with football, family, or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Seriously, every year we are guilted into spending thousands of dollars to head home for Thanksgiving when very few of the people that ever shared Thanksgivings in the original or post-Civil War sense were actually family.  When did this become another family holiday?  Football and parades have somehow become wrapped up in the entire day as well – two things I will never understand.  This is just another example of Americans taking something that someone else does and making it their own; then taking all the credit for it and pretending it was theirs all along.

So to review:

Thanksgiving as we know it now did not begin until after the Civil War.

Pilgrims did not host parades carrying large Peanuts balloons, nor did the Native Americans toss around a pigskin on national television.

Thanksgiving is a day of genocide and murder.  Genocide of the Native Americans; murder of millions of turkeys.

So enjoy your turkey smothered in gravy and trans fats, but leave your pilgrim hat at home this year.  Let’s call it for what it really is just this once.  Gobble gobble, mother fuckers.