I'm just going to be real with you: I plan to be waaaay too hung over to post on Friday. I might rehash some old missive from back in the day, or I might make a half-assed stab at writing some flash fiction, but I would expect the most stimulating thing anyone will hear from me will be an echo of "Europe" coming from the bathroom.
Thursday, of course, is Thanksgiving. I like to call it a distinctly American holiday, even though the whore bastard Canadians have one too, but of course they celebrate it at the wrong time. Last Thursday in November, people! Get with the program: program USA!
The most awkward part of Thanksgiving for me, is the big prayer before dinner. My dad always gives it, everyone bows their head for it, and I just kind of twiddle my thumbs and wait for it to be over, like prison rape, but without the cigarettes, but then again with the lifelong companionship of having someone to look out for you, care for you, make whiskey in a trash bag for you, and protect you from the Aryan brotherhood.
The prayer is usually a humble sort of thing - thanks for food, thanks for booze, thanks for everyone being here, an extra bit of tooth-grinding when the inevitable "thanks for the troops" comes around, and then we eat. It's usually not much of a tear jerker, and it's for all intents and purposes obligatory, and most attendees are happy to race through it (me at the front of the pack) and get to the "amen."
My own atheism isn't something I make too big a fuss over because I think that's kind of a dickhead thing to do, and I'm not usually the type to get involved in theosophical debate beside the occassional fun-poking at "invisible sky man," but it keeps coming up anyway. The fact that I'm blogging about this doesn't exactly make it seem like I'm anything BUT an atheist with some sort of bone to pick, but that's really everyone elses problem, and not mine.
Thanks-giving: it's pretty obvious that we're not thankful to the Indians. Was that the original meaning? Thanks, brown people, for the food so that we don't starve to death, now fuck off and go back to the woods? I really don't know. Every Thanksgiving I've been to in the last 32 years was white and casino-free, so I'm just guessing that we're supposed to offer up our praise to invisible sky man for making good things happen for us, like getting a job or getting married or not dying from smallpox-infected blankets.
It's there thrust upon me - like "in god we trust" on the money, rubbing my knuckles every time I go to shift my junk. It's there on the pickup truck in front of me as I cruise up 696, there on a billboard, here on a yard sign. Somehow the churches have become the least offensive symbol of religion, excepting of course those with twee little sayings like "God answers knee-mail" or "No Jesus, No peace, know Jesus, KNOW PEACE!!!111one," which are just tacky.
Also: abortion crosses.
When people call this a Christian nation, they're not talking about the framers who were predominantly deists, who could talk about the Puritain and the Mohammedan with equal romantic abstraction (just not the jews, blacks, or chinese) - they're talking about the colonists at Jamestown, Ipswitch, Salem, and Andover, the Jehovah's witnesses of Europe who, after having one too many Watchtower magazines ripped up in front of them, found enough financial backing to get a boat, sail across the Atlantic, and decimate the native populace before turning on each other in a jealous frenzy of superstition and bloodlust.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
As a corollary, I find many of the people caterwauling over this Christian nation business aren't such hot Christians themselves. They can quote conveniently political verses from Corinthians and Thessalonians, but couldn't find Corinth or Thessaly on a map. They can tell you that Jesus died for your sins, but they can't tell you much of what he said before that. They know of Eden,but in church they only Nod. They're assured of their place in heaven, and they can sure as shit tell you that you're going to hell.
So who do I thank, eschewing any named god in favor of an obscure eastern non-religion which has by and large been appropriated by hot topic and tattoo shops? How about those people who who try to keep this world going forward: the scientists, the readers, the thinkers, the writers, the live-and-let-livers, the nomads, the loners, the hermits, the helpers, the volunteers, the astronauts (especially the astronauts - space RULES!), the people who aren't trying to make the world a better place, but who just want to help without harming, who respect what I've long considered the most important freedom: The freedom to be left the hell alone. To not have to pick a side, to join in, to be for or against - to just be.
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