life off balance

ugh, this is my least favorite time of year. i hate thanksgiving and everything about it.

on the fitness message board i frequent, someone posted the “news” that some maryland schools “do not mention Thanksgiving because it is about giving thanks to God.” she went on to write, “Why don’t we thank someone else then, like maybe our troops in Iraq or our friends and family for loving us.”

i looked into it, and it turns out that the maryland schools in question have nothing against thanksgiving. they do celebrate thanksgiving as a secular holiday and discuss being thankful for things in general; they simply prohibit teaching students that they should specifically be thankful to god. in other words, it is the mention of god that is prohibited in the maryland schools, not the mention of thanksgiving. yes, that pesky first amendment is still in the constitution — this is news?

well, it is according to the religious right, who are upset that the schools don’t teach students to be thankful to god on thanksgiving. hence the coverage of the story by fox news and other conservative media outlets. this is so infuriatingly typical: it is just too easy for fox news to get moderate conservatives buzzing about “those crazy liberals banning thanksgiving from the schools.” they dredge up what should be a non-story (no god in public schools, still!) and spin it to sound so shocking that by the time the buzz reaches moderate conservatives they are all up in arms about something that isn’t even true. and i’m sure at this point they don’t really care that it isn’t even true.

anyway, i’d be all for not mentioning thanksgiving in schools, at least not unless they are also going to teach the children about factory farming of turkeys, the pilgrims’ religious intolerance, and the native american genocide that paved the way for colonization. why shouldn’t kids get the full story? that’s what school is supposed to be for: teaching actual historic facts, not promoting pilgrim propaganda and providing free advertising for the turkey farming industry. i pay my tax dollars to teach kids history, not to supply sweatshop-made cardboard happy turkeys to hang on the classroom walls.

by the way, in case anyone is under the misapprehension that my hatred of thanksgiving is merely vegan poor sportsmanship, my problem with thanksgiving is not that animals are killed for the traditional thanksgiving feast. animals are killed all the time, and it doesn’t make any difference to me if they are killed on the 3rd thursday in november, the 25th of december, the 4th of july, or the 10th of february. the problem with thanksgiving is: how do you rationally connect gluttony with being thankful? “we have so much to be thankful for, so in honor of that, let’s consume an even more disproportionate percentage of the world’s resources than we usually do! yee haw!” when did gluttony start being an acceptable way to show thanks? we don’t thank people for christmas gifts by calling them up and demanding even more stuff! it doesn’t make any sense.

plus, no other holiday fetishizes the murdered creature being eaten like thanksgiving. no one tacks up cardboard cut-outs of cartoon hotdogs on classroom walls around the fourth of july. no one would ever thinking of eating a bunny for easter dinner. no one pardons a pig destined to be a christmas ham and then sends it to disney world to be the grand marshal of the christmas parade. (yes, that is what they are doing with “marshmallow,” the turkey dubya pardoned.) i find it incredibly bizarre how people simultaneously fetishize and massacre turkeys on thanksgiving.

in my online research into the maryland school thanksgiving scandal, i came across this long and rambling rant against thanksgiving. i mostly skimmed it, but it does contain at least one nugget of wisdom buried in there, which is that the author proposes to we turn thanksgiving into a day of atonement.

i’m all for it. instead of a gluttonous feast in honor of being “thankful” that our forefathers were successful at building this country on the suffering and sweat of others, we should atone for the sins of our forefathers.

i love this country and i’m grateful for our freedom and our luxuries. i’m grateful to the early americans for founding this country, but i am not thankful for how they went about doing it. as much as we enjoy the luxuries of being americans today, we need to remember the expense at which they come to us. rather than further the suffering of others in the name of “giving thanks” (with mass turkey slaughter, thanksgiving decorations made in chinese sweatshops, and rampant over-consumption of food), i think it would be much more appropriate to atone for the suffering that is the underlying cost of all of the things we are so grateful for.

and yes, i’m a debbie downer and proud of it!

actually, liza and jill had the best idea - escape the country for thanksgiving altogether. next year i’m following their example and getting out of dodge.