The Republic of T. Archives

Wow. The Thanksgiving post generated more discussion than I expected, and more heated discussion than I expected, though that was probably naive on my part. It seems like much about the holiday falls into the category of that which is just about unmentionable in the U.S. without generating some degree response similar to Tom’s. It’s easier to just not talk about it. And while I probably expressed myself somewhat indelicately in my previous post, I can’t get past the idea that there are things that need to be said and remembered above and beyond the status quo, even in the midst of the football games, the parades, and the tryptophan induced coma.

The truth is there is more to Thanksgiving and the history around it and than what we were taught in third grade, or even well beyond then. That’s true with most of the mythology America and the west in general. It’s not that the information isn’t there.

Technorati Tags: culture, current events, politics, history, race

If you want to know what happened after Columbus’ arrival, the information is there in books as recent as Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States : 1492 to Present and Voices of A People’s History of the United States. If you want to know what happened to the Native Americans after the European arrival, its there in countless books like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. And you can see the pattern reflected in histories like Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conquest of Indigenous Peoples and King Leopold’s Ghost.

And it’s not like western europeans cornered the market on brutality and conquest, so much as they just had certain technological advantages in spreading their brand of it far and wide, as Jared Diamond lays out pretty convincingly in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Chances are, had another people achieved the same level of global dominance, history would have been just as chocked full of brutality and conquest as it already is. Just the hues would have been slightly different. Of course, history didn’t work out that way so you can only read about the other possibilities in works of fiction like The Years of Rice and Salt or Lion’s Blood, neither of which pretend that anything would have worked out much differently had the tables of history been turned.

The point of bringing up that history isn’t guilt. The truth is, particularly here in the U.S., most of us benefit in some way from the atrocities of the past. We didn’t commit them, of course. No one alive today slaughtered any Indians, broke treaties, took land by force, or enslaved anyone. We can’t go back and change anything that happened in the past. But we live with the consequences of that history even now. And now is what we’re all responsible for, both in the sense of addressing the lasting effects of historic injustices and in making sure we’re not repeating the same patterns today.

And I’ll gladly include myself in all of the above. If you want to bring bloodlines into the discussion, I own my share of it too; besides the obvious African heritage, there’s also a Native American blood from a great-great grandmother (from one of the Georgia tribes) and a white southern farmer of Scottish heritage who was my great-great grandfather (and who, according to legend, raped his way on to the family tree).

But how do we begin to acknowledge and address the consequences of our history that persist until today, without at least honestly acknowledging that history? Can we talk about this stuff? How are we supposed to talk about this stuff? Are we really not supposed to take our analysis of history and its results (for people other than us) beyond the third grade? Are we really supposed to forget the rest of the story and just set it aside or not bring it up?

As for Tom’s comments, the only thing I glean from them is that he’d really rather I just shut the fuck up about it and go along with the commonly accepted version of Thanksgiving, Columbus Day and the rest of history in general. Celebrate or shut the fuck up seems to be basic message. That and, based on his other comments, I should celebrate when groups like Focus on the Family get their message out in the media, back Bill Bennet, and I should support the Iraq war too.

None of them are positions I’m likely to take, though perhaps doing so might give me a shot at being the next Instapundit, or at the very least the next Michelle Malkin. They’re pretty comfortable with those positions and seems to have achieved some success upon adopting them. If there’s something else being said, I’m just not getting it. So, around and around we go. And we’ll continue to do so, I guess, since I’m unlikely to adopt the positions Tom prefers and I’m unlikely to shut up about it either.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 25th, 2005 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Culture, Current Events, Politics, Race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.