The Left and Thanksgiving

Opinion

Opinion written by George McClellan:

Greetings all and I hope everyone had a very, very happy Thanksgiving. More importantly, I would wish that every American understood exactly why we engage in this annual ritual of Giving Thanks by preparing and enjoying large family dinners! It had something to do with the Pilgrim Fathers. The left has gone to some pains to attempt to rewrite Americas history and I’m somewhat surprised that even after seven years of Obama’s Progressive enlightenment, we are still able to continue this celebration of life, grateful we’re not yet arrested and imprisoned, while appreciating what’s left of our few existing God given freedoms (Inalienable rights, actually).

The Pilgrims, a Calvinist bunch, dissented from the Act of Uniformity, a 1559 law making it illegal for citizens (of England) not to attend services of the Church of England, rather like what Obama’s (un)Affordable (no)Care Act requires of us here, today. Well, for the Pilgrims, that did it. They packed up their stuff, hired a boat (Mayflower) and here they came arriving in 1620. They had applied for a “patent” but left before it was granted so, to be legal, the company drew up the Mayflower Compact, an agreement on self governing.

Along with their piety, however, they brought with them the naive notion that if all in the company worked together and contributed equally to the common good, then all would share equally in the bounty. “From you according to your ability, to you according to your needs” (K. Marx). It didn’t take them long to abandon that idea when a few slackers demonstrated that so long as the communal barn stayed filled by the labors of others, they could wing it and skate.

Nature can be harsh, cruel and unyielding when one is unprepared. These folks, basically unable to maintain the food production required to sustain the caloric levels needed to produce labor, and food, found themselves in dire straits. Friendly natives, for whatever reason, provided them with corn, yams and wild turkeys and they survived a nasty winter. With the experience of near starvation, and surviving, a feast of thanksgiving was prepared and the Indians were invited. It had to have been a meager meal but they survived it. That’s the lesson here! The Pilgrims thanked God for providing the friendly Indians who helped them to survive.

Here’s where the record gets cloudy and anybody can interpret the history as it fits their narrative. Some accuse the Pilgrims of doing awful things to the Indians; some say the reverse happened, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. A few years earlier, an Englishman, Thomas Hunt, had captured some Indians and took them to Europe to sell as slaves, including a fellow named Squanto. Somehow Squanto got back and allied himself with the newly arrived Pilgrims. Whatever, I do know that a group of hardy but unprepared people faced an unknown future crossing an unknown ocean to arrive at an unknown place to face an unknown existence, and they did not abandon their belief in God in doing it. Indeed, their faith was the reason they came.

The Pilgrims were not Puritans. They were Calvinists. The Puritans, like our fearful GOP, capitulated to the Crowns demand to attend services of the Church of England. It was awhile before they got here. The Left still won’t come around to accepting the basic reasons for observing Thanksgiving and are unwilling to understand how it became woven into the fabric of American tradition. They now insist that the Pilgrims acted on different motives. In yet another stab at altering our Thanksgiving traditions, a writer at the Huffington Post would now have us believe that the Pilgrims were actually anagogic “refugees”, like the flood of Syrians now coming in. Well, It’s enough to say the Left doesn’t like America as it is and wants to change it into their image of a socialist utopia, an idea that already failed at the Plymouth Colony. Remember, freedom is the goal, the Constitution is the way. Now, go get ‘em. (25 Nov 2015)

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