Carving Thanksgiving: A Holiday on the Brink

Details

Category: Imperialism & War

Created on Friday, 26 November 2010 13:39

Written by Roxanne Amico

"I celebrate Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invite everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we have an enormous feast, and then I kill them and take their land." Jon Stewart

Kasama received these thoughts, penned on Thursday, 25 November 2010.

Cut To the Political Heart of a U.S. Holiday on the Brink

by Roxanne Amico

"... I thought of the blinded, armless, legless soldier in Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun, who, lying on his hospital cot, unable to speak or hear, remembers when his hometown gave him a send-off, with speeches about fighting for liberty and democracy. He finally learns how to communicate, by tapping Morse code letters with his head, and asks the authorities to take him to schoolrooms everywhere, to show the children what war is like. But they do not respond. 'In one terrible moment he saw the whole thing,' Trumbo writes. 'They wanted only to forget him.'"

The Ultimate Betrayal by Howard Zinn, The Progressive, April, 2004

* * * * * * *

Pasted to my desk for the past twenty some years is a cool photo, which a friend took of my mouth wide open, when she told me that I do my job of “making trouble for the status quo” really well. Pouring out of the image are these words I found in an article interviewing Paul Simon, when asked about the tension between silence and speaking in his creative process,

“And you say, 'I have nothing to say'… But the truth is, you always do, and often don’t want to say it. And that’s how you begin. You begin by talking about the subject that you didn’t want to talk about.”

I was going to remain silent about "Thanksgiving Day."

In fact, I was going to take a drive across the border… hang out in Toronto, but as the weather threatened rain and snow and I didn’t want that added stress, I’m here (at least for now) instead, decompressing from my wage-slave job that always ramps up stress at this time of year...