Happy Thanksgiving?

While many of us are thankful this time of year, there are always contrarians. LetsGoDU wanted to share this article from DU student Hsing Tseng published in Uloop: DU Politics several years ago entitled Why I Hate Thanksgiving.

The author contends that this vile holiday is driven by, "Puritan elite among these Pilgrims (who) later turned against the Native Americans and burned their villages to the ground. This merely continued a history of violence against the Native Americans that had begun since the Spaniards first came to the Americas, a history that would continue for centuries, a history that has still left many Native American peoples as second-class citizens."


The same people who 'systematically committed genocide' will sit in (our) recliners, "with family members, watch a parade of Snoopy floats and lip-syncing celebrities and hours of football on TV, cook a big meal and fall into a collective food coma and conveniently call it a holiday to appreciate what we have."

If that is not enough, 'we have food on the table by encouraging the mass annual commercial slaughtering of turkeys grown artificially and in poor conditions in order to meet the American demand. And we give thanks by consuming and encouraging each other to consume huge quantities of food – when there are still children in our US of A starving on the streets?

And family is another problem to be confronted during the holiday. Ms. Tseng talks about the "hassle Thanksgiving is, having to fly back home to see cranky relatives, taking time out of their precious 4-5 day weekend or their winter break to go endure some meaningless dinner that is exactly the same food, exactly the same conversations around the stove or the television every year. Moreover, some people are forced to work on Thanksgiving Day, unable to spend it with their families because those companies decided to make money from the last-minute grocery shoppers by denying their employees family time."

Let me think...

Where's the gravy and when's the game? I'm STARVING!