The True Story of Thanksgiving

Every year, Rush repeats the same monologue about how Thanksgiving was not about giving thanks to the Indians for them helping out during the Starving Time, but rather to God. And George Washington declared the first official Thanksgiving, again giving thanks to God rather than the Indians.

And I don't really care for the monologue. It always annoys me when Sean Hannity says that God "gave" us the best country in the world, the USA, when of course "He" did no such thing. English, Spanish and French explorers arrived in what would become the USA and proceeded to take what they wanted from the native Americans who were already there.

The thing is, just as slavery was a product of its time, so was the destruction of the native inhabitants of the land. Just as the Japanese did it to Ainu, just as African tribes were always killing each other before the white man came...it's just human nature to be warlike and for the strong to take what they want from the weak - race really has nothing to do with it. If the American Indians could have buried the hatchet in their hatred for each other (the various tribes) they might have been able to fight off the encroaching white man much longer than they did.

And how did whites defeat the Indians? Not really by defeating them in battle...but my killing all the buffalo on which the Indians subsisted. Thousands of buffalo killed every day, their carcasses left to rot in the sun...and finally the starving Indians had to surrender and be moved to reservations where OUR govrnment put them on the teat for good.

These days, most Indians on the reservations live in utter poverty. Most of them are alcoholics - because they have an inherent weakness for alcohol - and they continue to drain money from the taxpayer. I find it hard to blame the Indians for this however, as it was our government back then who set them on this path of utter dependence on the government.

There's a book out called American Apartheid, about the reservation system. I haven't read it, but I can get the gist. Reservations need to be done away with. It would be one thing if they were successful and the majority of people on those reservations were fully functional members of society and pulling their own weight, but they're not, and its the reservation system that is holding them down.