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Give Thanks for Nothing | «« back |
| by T. Ropelato (copy editor) | November 2009 |
Thanksgiving is a confounding holiday. We all learned the story in the 2nd grade; pilgrims have a crappy harvest, Native Americans share their food, everyone’s happy…yay. The part our elementary school play conveniently didn’t mention was when the pilgrims gave natives small pox, stole their land, and implemented a 400-year cultural genocide. To symbolize our Native brothers kindness for exchanging beads for property rights, we have now developed a holiday of glutton and passiveness.
Memories of thanksgiving revolve around food: great feasts at grandma’s house, pumpkin pie breakfast, weeks of leftover turkey sandwiches, and sweet tryptophan slumber. And also, giving thanks for the bounty placed before us. Who exactly are we giving all these thanks to? God is the easy answer, regardless of differing religious views; most people like to thank a higher power for the good things in life. The second easy answer would be family. More often than not we are thankful for our families love and support. But Thanksgiving, at its core, is not a religious or family holiday; it’s a national holiday to signify a historical event. So are we supposed to be thankful for our history, country and leaders? I sure as sh*t can’t be thankful for the supposed unity between the natives and settlers, or for the wars waged, bullets shot, and bombs dropped for the sake of the American way. This Thanksgiving was different. It felt more and more that I’m not the only one with a pessimistic outlook on life. Today, many people are finding it a lot harder to be thankful for anything. As I drive down Main St. I can’t help but wonder; how thankful are the people living in tents this year? Las Vegas has one of the highest (and still growing) homeless populations in the nation. We also have a soaring foreclosure rate, often settling at the top nationwide. According to many lists, Vegas is pretty much at the bottom of “Best city to…” and the top of “worst city to…”
I am thankful for my lost house, my mounting debt, my layoff, and my flat-screen.
This Thanksgiving I refused to be thankful. This year I wanted to be hungry...hungry for something more meaningful than pilgrims and pie. In that spirit I volunteered at a shelter. Maybe in the faces of the destitute I can discover meaning in this holiday. After all isn’t that what Thanksgiving should be about: helping others? Would we be here if the natives hadn’t been caring enough to not watch fellow humans starving to death? And after-all, the shelter is the one place where I can find something to be thankful for. No matter how screwed up I feel things are now, they could always be worse. And that’s something we can all be thankful for.
If you need help, or want to help this holiday season, please contact one of the many Las Vegas area shelters. |END
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