Never before today, 11/24/2016, had I realized how little people know about the history of the world. Never before today, had I known that so many people don’t care about the history of the world. This thanksgiving I realized that ignorance is truly bliss.
This whole season I’ve been hinting to people at work that Thanksgiving, and pretty much every US holiday, is way too commercial, people forgot some, if not all, of the atrocities associated with the histories. For whatever reason, be it ignorance, naivety or sheer dumbness, the truth is not being told. Most times, the truth can be told and not believed because we have come so far from the origins that we feel it doesn’t matter anymore.
If you don’t know and understand the past, you can never know and understand the future. #Facts.
In order to be successful at keeping people down. The truth has to be kept hidden from those people. Every person of color is always advised to ‘let it go,’ ‘forget the past,’ or ‘move on.’ Not once have I witnessed a Jew or a Caucasian told any of these things. They know their history and refuse to forget it. I don’t blame them. With that knowledge, they have been able to better themselves and overcome more present obstacles. Not POC.
We are constantly told to ‘forget it,’ ‘let it go,’ and what not. Because, if we know of our past, we can learn from it and then build a better future. As long as we’re kept in the dark about our past we will never know what our future should be like. Every person deserves s better future. #Facts.
That’s why knowing the truth about these U.S. holidays is key.
Did you know that the first Thanksgiving Day feast was a celebration of a slaughter of Native Americans? Then, after every fight which ended up in Native Americans being slaughtered, another feast was held. Until one day George Washington decided there should be only one celebration per year to commentate the original slaughtering of Native Americans.
Now, every year around the 4th Thursday in November, we sit down and re-celebrate a time of slaughter, because the white man is always so proud of his wrong doings. So much so that he builds holidays around them to celebrate the facts that he is so savage and slick enough to dangle the truth in the faces of the people, and disguise it as fun festivities. Know your history and claim your future.
Then you have Christmas.
A holiday so jacked up, it’ll never be the same. And who cares to change Christmas anyway? Way, way back in the day, long before Christianity was really a ‘thing’, we had people of the church and we had pagans. Pagans were those non religious types, and the church was always trying to convert the pagans. The church admired some of the pagan ways, but didn’t necessarily believe in them.
One in particular was the celebration of the winter solstice. The church saw this as a chance to reform, because the pagans didn’t believe in the church’s Jesus. The church had to make Jesus seem more human, so they gave him a birthday and designed a story that would ultimately have the pagans believing in the church and conforming. The idea was that if you want to show that Jesus was a real human being, like every other human being, then what better way to think of him as such than being born in a normal, humble human way and his greatness is reason enough to celebrate his birth? Hello Christmas.
Not saying that the holidays shouldn’t be celebrated. It’s just that knowledge is always power.
With that being said, I wish you all happy holidays. Whether it’s Thanksgiving, Christmas, or any other holiday. Know your history and claim your future. Be careful of the traditions you choose to follow. No matter how far from the original you are. If you are doing something in the fashion of someone else, you are doing the same thing. Nine times out of ten, your generation will pass it down to the next generation and so on. Stand up and stop the cycle.
Either way, I am thankful for my wife and the life we have together. My two sons. My parents and Nana. My in laws. My nieces and nephews. My friends and family. My reader audience. GMP and my editor, Wilhelm Cortez, I wish you all happy holidays.
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