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For folks in the United States, it is once again Thanksgiving, something I have been discussing off and on over the last few days.  (Those outside the US, have a good day.)  I have already seen posts to social media feeds articulate thanks for things, and I have seen others that mark the day as National Genocide Day, a day solemnizing the near-total destruction of First Nations populations across centuries.  And I cannot say that either set is wrong.

(Of course, there is always the issue of my exercise of privilege in entering into such discussions.  After all, I am a member of almost all of the groups that enjoy particular privilege in the United States; I am almost the embodiment of the person for whom "the system" is designed to work.  Only my socioeconomic status interferes, and that only mildly; I am not wealthy, but I am not poor, so I am among the unmarked and therefore the secondary beneficiary of "the system."  Only for the wealthy do prevailing cultural assumptions work better than they do for me.  My ethos for entering into discussions of the generational experience of oppression is therefore weak, as I have been told more than once.)

It would be irresponsible to ignore the less pleasant parts of human history; we are a violent and bloodthirsty species, overall.  And it is true that many of the holidays any current group celebrates are borrowed from earlier celebrations, decontextualized from their "original" or original intents.  The same is true for many of our other cultural practices--whatever "our" is under discussion (or perhaps "your," since I cannot include myself among many of the groups that my cultural and biological forebears have trodden down).  It seems if we are to eschew things because they have a bloody history, if we are to set aside practices because they began in anger and hate, then there is nothing that can be done.  No act is without violence; no history is without conflict; no ancestry is without wrongdoing, and while questions of scale are valid and usefully asked, at some point, they cease to matter.  Quantification fails.

I had not intended to go even so far into the issue as I have (and I know that there is much more to say about the matter).  I had intended only to offer up my own statement of thanks, rather than broaching the topic of how fraught this holiday--any holiday, really--is (and they all are, which I can discuss on other occasions, if I remember to do so).  But the world is complex, and so engagement with the world, to be honest and open, must be likewise complex.  And I am thankful that things are thusly complex; were they simple, all would have been figured out by this point, and the challenge of living would be over.  (Again, though, my privilege speaks; my challenges may be minor and entertaining, but those others face are surely not.  Whether I ought to be thankful that it is so...perhaps for the former, but not the latter.  Complexity, again.)