Happy Thanksgiving to Everyone - Except You, Axios
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Every Thanksgiving, we are called to be grateful for the good around us. In recent years, we have also been reminded about how badly our country has acted in the past. This year, It’s Axios filling the much-needed role of guilt-pusher.
“Thanksgiving in the United States is based on a mythical feast between the Wampanoag people and Mayflower Pilgrims,” the article begins. “The holiday's real story is mixed with national unity and racial exclusion.”
It doesn’t get any better. Further into the article, after recounting the early Americans’ mistreatment of Indigenous peoples (which did happen; no one is refuting that), Axios ensures that we will not enjoy the traditional Thanksgiving football games: “Until the Civil Rights Movement, restaurants that held Thanksgiving gatherings excluded Black Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and (ironically) Native Americans — all of whom would develop their own Thanksgiving traditions.”
Again, all of this is true. There are plenty more examples, too. The Trail of Tears, Jim Crow laws, Japanese-American encampments. They must all be taught in schools and captured in history books as a reminder of our messy American history.
Thank goodness we continually evolve as a nation. We recognize the mistreatment of the past. We are collectively sorry for the wrongs that were committed.
But these aren’t our wrongs.
If we don’t want to repeat history, we must look at these dark moments and commit ourselves to doing better. That means we should also look at ways that we have been better.
For example, the Axios article highlights Sarah Josepha Hale, “editor of the widely circulated Godey's Lady's Book magazine, (who) campaigned aggressively for a national Thanksgiving holiday as a tool for unity as the country moved closer to the Civil War. She wrote President Lincoln…and the president declared the holiday five days after getting her letter in 1863.”
However, Axios won’t allow the reader to appreciate Hale’s altruistic deeds for long. “Although Hale was an abolitionist against the enslavement of Black Americans, she supported the idea of free Black people leaving the U.S. for ‘colonies’ in Africa.” Axios won’t admit that change doesn’t happen in one fell swoop. It takes generations of collective work.
Hale offered one small part of the solution. Other Americans have to find their own ways of healing wounds and uniting others. That doesn’t come from an article bashing the first Thanksgiving and the country as a whole. It comes from acknowledging the past while moving forward. It’s not about feeling guilty; it’s about being committed to improving the country, little by little.
So eat your turkey and your pumpkin pie, and be thankful for what you have. Even you, Axios.