The Thanksgiving Day holiday was first observed by colonists in New England and Canada as random days of ‘thanksgivings,’ in the form of prayers for blessings of safe journeys, military victories, or abundant harvests. Americans later more self-consciously modelled their holiday celebration after a 1621 harvest feast shared between the Wanpanoag and some English colonists seeking refuge from persecution in their British homeland, becoming known as the ‘Pilgrims.’
In most North American homes, families now celebrate mainly the blessings of being together without any acknowledgement or even awareness of the historical legends surrounding the transformation of religious rituals to the national holiday known by all as Thanksgiving Day. It has become a way of giving thanks for the blessings of life without attention to the dark foundations of these breakaway British colonies, including genocidal tactics employed to clear coveted land of native peoples as well as the importation of slaves from Africa to make the land productive while cruelly abusing these workers of cotton fields and farmlands forcibly removed from their distant homelands by the most predatory crimes of early capitalism. For progressives as with some other naively celebrated holidays, most notably, Columbus Day, these celebratory occasions have increasingly become times to take note of past moral failures societal and state criminality.
This year Thanksgiving Day assumes an especially problematic character, not because of the past but because of the present. For me it is better observed in the spirit of A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE AND REMORSE. Such a dark perspective is adopted to produce creative tensions between the enjoyment of a turkey meal with the onset of deliberately induced mass starvation in the Gaza Strip among the Palestinian survivors of the Israeli onslaught of recent months, including interference with the delivery of food by international aid and relief workers. As well this year’s critical remarking of thanksgiving serves as a grim reminder of the instrumental role of the US Government in the escalation of nuclear risks and rejection of diplomacy in the Ukraine War. The United States, together with several NATO allies, is willing for delusional purposes to sacrifice Ukrainian lives and wellbeing while increasing prospects of a major war, so that it might humiliate Russia with a battlefield defeat.
By remembrance and remorse this year, we can reendow a popular holiday with the sobriety of a hard look at our national ethos of Western global hegemony is being experienced by the disillusioned and frightened peoples of the world. Hopefully, Thanksgiving Day 2025 can be celebrated in moderate, yet mindful, good faith as the blessings of precious life for all.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 