The larger democratic issue remains a U.S. strategy conducted and – alas – directed in Washington by big money interests that care not about the health and welfare of the United States or its citizens.
The most American of holidays, Thanksgiving, has its roots in early 17th century pilgrims – illegal aliens in a sense, as immigrant celebrations of survival because of bountiful – and importantly – shared harvests.
President George Washington ruling from New York City, a freedom fighter that the British regarded as a terrorist – first designated the celebration of Thanksgiving by our national government a century later in 1789. Previously the Continental Congress of our nascent republic proclaimed several such days at varying times during the war of rebellion against England.
General Washington himself in December of 1777 celebrated a day of “Thanksgiving” after the defeat of the British at Saratoga during what has come to be known as our War of Independence, a war conducted when we were still a loose confederation of colonies who rebelled in part because we were resisting the taxation needed to pay for the ongoing folly of foreign wars and entanglements of our then legal government located across the Atlantic ocean. Sounds all too familiar today, only it is we that are promulgating the wars.
Some maintain that Thanksgiving became a true national holiday in 1863 during another bloody war, this one fought initially to keep our new nation united, but a war that ultimately evolved to end the dreadful practice of slavery. Unfortunately, it did not end racism as is all too evident in current headlines.
Back then, President Lincoln proclaimed that the last Thursday of November would be a National Day of Thanksgiving. Slavery the issue that writers of our Constitution, many of them slaveholders and all of them wealthy, feared to address because of economic self interest, ignoring the ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident beliefs they professed in their own Declaration of Independence.
This failure of foresight, failure of political courage to address the ethical and legal problems that would ensue, as well as the fearsome bloodshed it would take to resolve them only partially, is cause for thanks – thanks that it would, be over, eventually, as the Civil War dragged on.
Fighting still another war, this one economic but just as devastating to overall American well-being, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered that Thanksgiving should always be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of the month in an attempt to promote holiday shopping earlier to stimulate a stalled economy. Little did he know that Thanksgiving would become a new form of oppression for our economically underprivileged who are now forced to work on a holiday, many of them at starvation wages.
Nevertheless, today on Thanksgiving, let us – We the People – give thanks for our current tattered democracy, which in spite of the egregious Supreme Court Citizens United decision (from the spiritual successors of the judges who ruled in 1857 that Dred Scott was property) that ensures the rich and only the very rich will dictate policy and have their laws passed. All this while avoiding personal taxes and moving corporations offshore to avoid paying taxes. It’s time for a constitutional amendment to put this right.
Indeed, we citizens / taxpayers are once again attempting to make things right – but not enough of us, as the last election turnout showed. Let us remember and respect the hard battles past and the citizen soldiers who fought them, while girding ourselves for the political, economic and ongoing military battles we now face.
Through it all, remember there can be more reasons to celebrate at Thanksgivings to come, particularly if we adhere to the “We the People” principle of our founding fathers. Call it American optimism or American liberalism and expanding inclusiveness – for these problem-solving, practical American traits, we can always be thankful, but only if you vote.
