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There are two annual traditions that make up Thanksgiving. One is the ancient and venerable tradition of thanking the Creator for our bounty while the other is the more recent leftist tradition of turning the day into a festival of grievances, a ‘festivus’ during which they pick political arguments with family members and launch into screeds about how Thanksgiving is the product of imperialism and colonialism.
The Nation magazine recently proposed replacing it with a ‘Truthsgiving’ during which we will all confess our crimes and ponder how much better life would be if the Pilgrims had never come to America, and the Nazis and Communists had won WWII and gone on to exterminate 70% of the population of the planet.
Wrecking Thanksgiving, like the family, womens’ sports and Star Wars is just one of those things lefties do. The perpetual teenage tantrums that began with Karl Marx and ended with Cousin Jan screaming at the Thanksgiving table about how nobody understands Hamas and how inspiring she found Osama bin Laden’s letter are the essence of the movement.
The idea of Thanksgiving is scary to a movement obsessed with power and grievance. The essence of the holiday is gratitude and that requires taking a step back and acknowledging the limitations of our power. From the environment of the planet to every detail of our lives, the Left is obsessed with control, but Thanksgiving, like most religious festivals, is about surrendering that control to a higher power. G-d.
True people of faith are humble. Thanksgiving requires humility and the recognition that we are not ultimately in charge. While we can and should strive, we cannot do everything, and our successes are owed to a force that utterly transcends us and our efforts. But to believe that is to reject most of the objectives of the Left.
The utopian conviction that the purpose of life is to study politics and take power is a poisonous secular religion, more akin to Islam, than to Christianity and Judaism, whose fixation on power stems from the desire, as George Soros and other leftist billionaires have admitted, to play god. And to play god, is to deny that there is an actual Deity, only a chaotic world that has to be ordered by god-like humans.
There’s no room for gratitude for the aspiring man-gods, the cults of personality, the mean and cheap little substitutes for religion that speak of love, but preach only hate.
The Left rejects gratitude. As Stalin said, “Gratitude is a sickness suffered by dogs.” Resentment is what gives the Left purpose. The more leftists receive, the more they resent. Their resentment is in inverse proportion to their bounty. That is why Western leftists are the most resentful of them all.
Rather than fleeing blessed by prosperity and comfort, they grow arrogant and certain of themselves. The blessings around feed their egos and inflate their narcissism and stir up neuroses so that they alternate between ecstasies of power and catastrophes of doom. They imagine a new world and break the old one.
Gratitude is an antidote to arrogance, it is one of the best defenses against leftism. Teach your children gratitude and you give them a knowledge of G-d, a sense of security and their place in the universe.
Teach them leftism and you teach them to scream at you across the Thanksgiving table.
Giving thanks is a great virtue.
That depends on what you’re giving thanks for and who you are giving thanks to.
There is rational gratitude and there is irrational gratitude.
The Muslims give thanks to God for the murder of Jews and infidels. The Nazis gave thanks to God for giving them Hitler.
There are rational and benevolent notions of God but there are also irrational and evil notions of God. Ayn Rand welcomed and used the phrases “Thank God” and “God bless you”, to her it meant the highest good and virtue possible to man.
Rand was an atheistic Jew, a woman of depraved morals who did not respect the rights of others. She created rights to justify her own wicked desires for sex, influence and power. Look at her life and actions to see the outworking of her ethics. Her religion required absolute worship and obedience of whatever she herself proclaimed as “good.” She was, in fact, an agent of evil disguised as “philosophy.”
Rand’s saying “Thank God” or “God bless you” speaks of the remnants of the faith of her better ancestors, whom she betrayed. It speaks of her innate parasitism upon the achievements of others. Her “philosophy” was parasitic, producing nothing new under the sun.
Examples:
How do “facts” of existence produce morality?
If Rand’s assertion that consciousness precedes existence, and matter is eternal, how can we escape the logical conclusion that eternal matter miraculously and supernaturally produces both life and consciousness?
What person needs encouragement to be selfish?
Flabby and flaccid. Let the purple prose proceed.
So, THX, you lecture us about how our gratitude to God is wrong and irrational. That is criticism. How about you lecture us about the great good for which you are grateful? What could that possibly be?
And ingratitude is a sin, in my opinion.
“The ingratitude of the recipient may be less reprehensible than the motives of the benefactor.” – Francois de la Rochefoucauld
Never look a gift horse in the mouth (when the donor is looking).
Grateful I’m not anybody that has to spend Thanksgiving with Susan Sarandon,
Now that was funny.
“A Prayer for Production | An Objectivist Ode to Thanksgiving”
I give thanks for the First Amendment to the Constitution — which protects my right to practice religion, or practice no religion.
I give thanks to live in a country where Freedom of Speech is protected — where I can advance controversial ideas, like those promoted by Ayn Rand, relatively free from government interference.
I give thanks to live in a market economy, hampered though it be with government controls, where people are relatively free to produce and trade freely.
I give thanks for the fact that I bought all the food I have prepared at a local grocery store. I am so thankful that I have so many grocery stores to choose from — stocked with a dazzling array of products sourced from around the world at competitive prices all created with an aim of making money.
I’m extremely grateful for large scale, industrial farming — with produce and meat farmed and sourced globally.
I give thanks for the invention of pesticides, preservatives, and plastic — all of which have saved the lives of millions who would otherwise have died of food poisoning or starvation.
I’m grateful for the people who took such risks to drill, dig and engineer to discover and refine energy sources that are keeping me warm, and fueling the massive transport system of trucks, ships, planes and cars that brought this food to the table. – Jennifer A. Grossman
https://uk.atlassociety.org/post/a-prayer-for-production-an-objectivist-ode-to-thanksgiving
Powerful imagery of shouting around the ‘family’ table. What a contrast to the scene described in psalm 128: ….Your wife is a fruitful vine in the innermost parts of your home, your children are like olive plants around your table……
Amen Una! Happy T-givin to all
Happy Thanksgiving.
Well, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, the Left is trying to destroy and “re-imagine” and “contextualize” all of our national holidays and create new ones focusing on race and gender. Gee, what’s that about? Next up, have a happy George Floyd Day of Remembrance.
The day after Thanksgiving is supposedly indigenous people’s day………to woketard lefties.
The Nation liberal leftists Rag should lose aa whole lot of its readers and subscribers over this load of poppycock/Malarkey and let them print the truth in their leftists rag for once and the Chief Eitor to fully apologize to the people for their fake news
All are welcome at my home for today’s feast. Eat, drink, and be merry.
However do not under any circumstances bring up politics. I do not care if you are left or right, if you talk politics today at my home you will be told to leave. Simple as that. Today is not a day to talk of our differences, today is a day to find common ground, enjoy each others company, and by doing that, it is my small part to help heal the divide in our country. I beleive that if everyone was to set aside just 1 day a year where we can come together as freinds and leave behind the problems of the world it would make a difference. During WW1 the allied forces and the German forces came together for a Christmas dinner with out hostilities. If 2 opposing armies can do it we can do it as fellow countrymen.
What if the Pilgrims never came and the United States never existed? Well my guess is sometime in the 30’s or 40’s the German/Japanese/Russian invaders would have arrived, exterminated all of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, and eventually lead to more or less the same world we currently have, except it would be completely devoid of diversity, inclusiveness, freedom and happiness. Not to mention nothing resembling the EPA, unions, public schools for all or good health care.
The leftists teach the kids that the Dutch bought New York from the Indians for a handful of beads. What they don’t tell the kids is that beads were used as money in those days.
They also tell the kiddies that the thanks was for the Indians, because the Indians saved them. And evil whitey eventually killed as many Indians as they could in a fit of racist genocide.