Blah, blah, blah, Indians, Indians, Indians, white guilt, white guilt, white guilt. As I posted in my pre- Thanksgiving PSA, we see idiotic threads like this every year.
Here are some fun facts, which I can speak with some level of authority on, considering I have a B.A. in History, informally specialized in American colonial history, and am a candidate for certification to become a middle school Social Sciences teacher:
1. History is not as black and white as this DUmmy and other leftists make it out to be, things are almost always a lot more complicated than a simple "This side was completely right, that side was completely wrong." There were atrocities on both sides. For just one personal example, my own ancestors include a family of settlers who were brutally slaughtered by an Indian war party for no reason at all. The only survivor was their young son, who hid in a hollow log during the massacre and then went to live with neighbors. I refuse to cast blame or feel hatred for the descendants of the people who did that to my ancestors, if any remain today.
2. I am of course sorry for the awful things that were done to the Native Americans, but I refuse to wallow in self- imposed guilt over something I personally had nothing to do with that happened centuries ago, in which the only similarities between the perpetrators and myself are skin color and the basic religion of Christianity (At least, they identified as Christians, yet the things they did cast serious doubt on the genuineness of their walk with God).
3. As I've noted in the past, the Pilgrims at Plymouth who brought about the first Thanksgiving got along very well with the native tribes for a very long time. They coexisted peacefully for decades, and on at least one occasion, the Pilgrims convicted and hanged a white criminal based solely on the testimony of an Indian. Relations between the Plymouth colonists and the Indians did not really start to sour until King Philip's War, which occurred over fifty years after the first Thanksgiving. That conflict, too, in keeping with what I said in point 1, was the result of oversights and abuses from both sides of the equation, not just one. The Plymouth leaders, a new generation who had largely forgotten just how screwed their ancestors would have been if not for the Indians' help and thus developed a real gratitude problem, abused their power and had begun pushing too far and overstepping their authority in terms of their use of Indian land and treatment of its people. On the other side, the Indian leader Metacomet (Nicknamed "King Philip," hence the name of the war) had apparently forgotten the good example of his own father who, when he was chief, got along quite peacefully with the colonists. Metacomet's own actions proved he was itching for any excuse, no matter how petty, to cast those decades of past peaceful relations aside and openly declare war on the colonists. When that much stubborness and belligerence from both sides gets together, the end results are never pretty.
Again, while both the good and bad parts of our nation's history should be remembered (And schools are getting better at ensuring that, as my education shows), we should not obsess over the bad parts or use them as an excuse to either wallow in self- imposed guilt over things that we had nothing to do with, or use them to try and justify hatred or bigotry against others.
Instead, we should celebrate Thanksgiving the way it was meant to be celebrated; As a way of remembering and acknowledging the basic blessings in our lives that we have to be thankful for. So, to that I say, happy Thanksgiving!
