Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, Thursday is Thanksgiving, and this will be my first one down in FL where it's just our cadet branch of the B family. The rest of the B family will be gathering up north.

    This week we celebrate the insanely brave, and sometimes just insane colonists of Plimouth Plantation, who, despite being surrounded by the Wampanoag tribe on all sides, refused to cave in to their demands to join in the Wampanoag's continuous state of war and commit an act of genocide against the neighboring tribes, starting with the Pequod to their south.


 I grew up down the road from Plymouth. I had to take a school field trip to the fucking plantation every. damn. year.For some reason, the details of the conditions around the time of the first treaty with the Wampanoag get left out.

 Still, it makes it harder to stomach the whole 'day of mourning' shit the hyphen-americans like to trot out. The baby in this bathwater is that they're protesting how the fundamentalist Protestants didn't want to become a mercenary army fighting for the Wampanoags.



 I can't stand that whole 'peaceful, living in harmony' shit that the Indians got away with. Being in continuous war for centuries at a time isn't peace. And that whole respecting nature bullshit? It's super easy to find where Indians camped in New England. NOTHING GROWS THERE, HUNDREDS OF YEARS LATER. Scorched earth like the Romans dreamed of. 

 And this is not to say that it was by any means a justification for what the colonists did to the natives in the long run. It's reasonable to cite the Indians, Irish and Caribbean peoples and just say that it was just the British being British, and we inherited that unsavory dehumanizing attitude towards indigenous peoples.Throwing all the casinos and tax free tobacco we can at their descendents just doesn't seem like enough to assuage that guilt.