Lots of Post Modernist types like me have a little problem with celebrating our invasion of this Brave New World. But you know, we weren't as successful in our predations as we sometimes make out. It was really the bugs we brought over which decimated the Native Americans. Without those diseases, we probably would have been utterly turned back by superior warriors with something real to fight for.
Now we're terrified of other supposedly unenlightened types, who believe in a different style of spirituality from our own. And we go at them with the very same mismatch of weaponry, and we'll probably take credit too, when they perish, inevitably, of the diseases of modernism. Like our blue jeans, we spread these incidentally over the entire globe, never mind our rapacious designs on earth's treasures.
Still, I don't mind celebrating Thanksgiving in its true spirit. It's a time to come together with friends and family, and actually to remember who lived here first, and what we would be without that grant. I suppose you could almost say that the Natives here will celebrate the last laugh as we kill ourselves off now with corn sweeteners.
But we're not dead yet.
We still have a chance to retreat from Empire building. Our President, ever the wiser man, has postponed his announcement of new swarms of troops until after we feast. And then he will invite the entire world to take part in what still can be a mission to create rather than to destroy our peace.
It's never easy, though, when those we send have been so mis-schooled into thinking that we are the good guys by the default of dreaming it up. That somehow our flag is better than theirs, and our style of family gathering puts theirs to shame. Whoever they are.
There is something magical about what we, the people, have created on these stolen shores. The whole world saw it, just as the whole world cringes when we act like uncivilized and spoiled bratty usurpers. If we actually do manage legitimately to reclaim for ourselves what it is we've given over to crass corporatism these last forty or so years, then there will be no trouble at all getting the world to join our efforts.
We've come of age now since pretty womanizing JFK beat the television marketing bejeezus right out of innocent wooden Tricky Dick. Let's prove it to the whole world. Let's show that we can't be fooled by the marketers into believing in an America as completed fact, when we're still very much on the make.
We've never yet been true to our promise.
We're still brand new. Our entire history up until now has been one long story of greed and corruption, which has been just fine for so long as there remained great stores from mother nature.
Our frontier has ended. There's no more free bounty. Our frothy wealth no longer spills freely over the entire globe. We're suffocating our earth, and it's long since become clear that we're not innocent about the misery in our wake.
Mom's lost her patience, and has no more to grant us in any case. It's time for us to smarten up, give up the magical thinking of our youth, and re-read our constitution.
There won't be endless stores of oil, and even if there were, it would melt us down to burn them. There won't be endless clean energy to allow us to continue a rapacious life-style. There won't be some savior coming down from the skys. But there's plenty we can do right here and now if we decide to.
Let's show the world what we've got in us. Let's get our act together, and stop allowing the ones who have only proven their success in the old world - the modern world - from continuing to control it now. They're done. They have nothing to offer us now.
The oil companies, the drug marketers, the health insurance consortiums. They sell death and we should know it. There's far too much good news afoot for us to let the ones who hoard our wealth make all the decisions. We the people should give thanks and then take back our government. You have to wonder why we gave it away in the first place, unless we thought folks with good hair and pretty faces were really that much better than us.
Spread some love. It travels faster and better than H1N1, and won't make anyone rich who doesn't need to be.
Happy Thanksgiving!!
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