Tuesday, November 12, 2013

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I was going to write something else today, something talking about how nice it is to have the kind of job that allows me to do such things as have running fights with my snooze button and cook a nice breakfast for my lovely wife (it is, and I did, by the way).  But I looked at my media feeds this morning, and as I did, I recalled things I have seen in stores and around the campus as I have walked between work and Sherwood Cottage, and I realized that I had something different to say than I had originally intended.  I suppose that it is hardly unique that I make the comment, but I find myself annoyed that Thanksgiving is being more or less ignored, and for damned stupid reasons.

I am angered by what I read in such stories as that by Amrita Jayakumar and Abha Bhattarai in the 11 November 2013 Washington Post, "Kohl’s, Target, Toys R Us Add to Early Holiday Shopping Frenzy," that Thanksgiving is being shoved aside in favor of lucre.  I have written before to my high regard for Thanksgiving, and even if its history is problematic in being bound up with the faulty mythology the United States uses to try to justify its colonialist oppression of First Nations peoples to its children (how many of us were told that "the first Thanksgiving" was an amicable affair?), I still find it a just and worthy thing to dedicate a day to gratitude for the things that are offered to us (and I know that my privileged position as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant man of the US middle class influences that belief, thank you).  Too, I am certainly still appreciative of having a full belly and taking naps (the former is attested by my breakfast comment and the picture offered here).  That something I regard as being just and worthy is being interdicted vexes me greatly, and I avow that I will not partake of that which interferes; however good the sales may be that day, I will not be shopping them.

This is not the first time I have complained about the misappropriation of holidays, the first time I have expressed dissatisfaction about the way in which the United States warps itself on "special days"--even that which ought to be paramount in the national celebrations.  It may well not be the last, even if I am screaming vainly into the wind, my voice lost against the cacophony of commercials hawking wares at discounted prices purchased only through the oppression of workers across the world.  I suppose, though, that in the increasing numbers of sales on holidays, the increasing subsuming of celebration by crass materialism (again, I know that my own biases manifest here, thank you), the people of the United States as a whole indicate what it is that is truly important to them.

I have said before that I am a hypocrite--but I have also said before that I am in abundant company.  How Thanksgiving is being treated shows the truth of the latter.

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