My Thanksgiving EveryJoe article discusses the political, economic, and religious meaning of the holiday, and discusses why Political Correctness is set to obliterate Thanksgiving much more so than Christmas
WISER THAN GOD
When is the last time you saw a Pilgrim or an Indian?
My son brought home from school a project he had made in arts and crafts showing a smiling Mayflower Pilgrim with a buckle on his hat, and I realized, thunderstruck, that I had not seen any Thanksgiving decorations in the public square or shopping markets, schools or streets since the turn of the millennium. Instead, Christmas music begins to play on my local radio station immediately after the Eve of the Feast of All Souls.
Thanksgiving is nearly a perfect holiday, since by rights it combines the awesome and uplifting act of humiliating oneself to God in thanks for the bounties and blessings poured onto this nation by Providence, with the tradition of gathering the family and clan together in a feast of sumptuous proportions, a feast meant to remind us of the wealth the hard work of our fathers created for us, and to remind us of the hard-won liberty and wise laws protecting our rights to enjoy that wealth and worship that God.
Thanksgiving sums up the three greatest blessings of America. Our political system is a voluntary mutual compact of limited and equal government enshrining individual rights; our economic system is a free market protecting individual property; and our religious heritage is one of the liberty of the individual conscience, a principle found in only faith in the world.
The 3 Cs of America are Constitutionalism, Capitalism, and Christianity. At Thanksgiving, we give thanks for all three at once.
Or we once did.
The first foreshadowing of the Constitutional form of government on this continent was the Mayflower Compact. How is it remembered and honored?
I looked up two textbooks to see. The first was Triumph of the American Nation, published in 1986. If you read this textbook, this is the Mayflower Compact you remember. It is a purely political document with no mention of the central purpose of the pilgrimage (ellipses in the original):
We whose names are underwritten, …having undertaken … a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do … solemnly and in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
Keep in mind this was a deliberately pro-American textbook written in the days when Political Correctness was just getting started.
By way of contrast, my son’s textbook McDougal Littell The Americans, published in 2003, mentions the Mayflower Compact only in a sidebar, where it is described in two paragraphs, one of which says the Compact was written in response to the Pilgrim fear that the non-Pilgrims aboard the vessel would challenge their authority.
The textbook quotes but a dozen words from the charter, in this sentence:
The Mayflower Compact stated that the purpose of their government in America would be to frame “just and equal laws…for the general good of the colony.” Laws approved by the majority would be binding on Pilgrim and non-Pilgrim alike.
So if you read this more modern textbook, you remember the Mayflower Compact as something born of the fear of the Pilgrim’s losing their authority over the non-Pilgrims, and using the document to set the minority under their control. So it is not even a political document any more, merely a political sleight of hand.
…
Political Correctness is a new religion as well as being a new political and economic system. It is alien to the American character in every way, but most especially because there is no room, in a worldview where everyone is a helpless victim or a ruthless oppressor, for the emotion of gratitude.
There will be no further giving thanks for anyone to anything once Political Correctness completes the spread of its choking darkness over our land, kills all hope, halts all industries, destroys all wealth, shatters all laws, burns all churches, reduces all art to rubbish, all men to eunuch and all words to jabberwocky.
There is no room in postmodern history showing peaceful cooperation between races, no room for decorations showing Pilgrims and Indians together. There is no room for gratitude toward an Indian for saving our ancestors, hence us.
We are not allowed to call them Indians, nor to show admiration for them, wear Halloween costumes or put up decorations depicting them, or name our ball teams after them.
We are not allowed to express any emotion toward these native peoples on whose generosity in the early days – (the Indian wars were much later) – the survival of our ancestors depended, except that contempt mingled with pity which the sole emotion Political Correctness allows toward the weak. Hatred is the only emotion allowed toward everyone else.
There is no room for Thanksgiving in the PC reaches of desolation occupying the land once called America.
Read the whole thing: http://www.everyjoe.com/2015/11/25/lifestyle/thanksgiving-ruined-by-politically-correct-culture/#ixzz3suHqPd99
