Misgivings About Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving (Screen shot from http://youtu.be/v_pncabZ12I)

With Thanksgiving being tomorrow and all, I feel compelled to write about it. But — because grad school has taught me that almost everything that appears to be simple is probably much more complicated and troublesome than you could ever imagine — I’m not sure I can write about it without either just repeating your usual holiday cheer stuff or ruining Thanksgiving entirely.

Because here’s the thing: When you really start to think about everything that has led to and contributes to our contemporary celebration of Thanksgiving, things get, to put it gently (and to use a term beloved by grad students everywhere), problematic. So, while I don’t want to gloss over the issues this holiday has, I also don’t want to rain on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, either. What I can’t figure out, however, is how to do both those things in one article.

So, I think I’ll leave it up to you to decide. If you want to know about some of the problems with Thanksgiving, then you can click on any one of these links. Fair warning: Those articles see this holiday differently and that will more than likely bum you out.

But, even though they will probably make you think about some unpleasant aspects of our history, I think it’s important to always consider the positive with the negative. As we like to say around here, reading those articles will give you another side of the story from the one we’ve all been told from the moment we first learned about Thanksgiving. How you then choose to process and use that information is up to you.

On the other hand, if you want to remain blissfully unaware and continue to sleep soundly at night, then you can do that too. Just skip over those links.

When you wake up on Thursday after a wonderful night’s rest, don’t forget to look at the football schedule and stuff your face with as much turkey as possible. Make sure to save some room for pumpkin pie. And, most of all, remember to stay gold, Ponyboy.

Stay gold.

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Charlie Crespo (@Little_Utopia) is the editor-in-chief of Little Utopia.