First Principles

The Seattle Public Schools have felt it necessary to remind their teachers that Thanksgiving is not a time of celebration, but for some, it is a time to mourn “500 years of betrayal.”

Never mind that the first American Thanksgiving was celebrated a mere 361 years ago.   Or that there is no cultural or racial affiliation that has ever been required for appreciating having enough food to get you through the winter.  Or that no Seattle School Board member has yet called for an end to the paid four day weekend every November.

The most offensive part of this sort of thing, though, is the “Noble Savage” myth that it relies on.  The Indians who lived in what is now New England (and indeed, in the entirety of the Americas) had their own alliances, prejudices, and politics.  There was plenty of betrayal and misunderstanding to go around in those days, just as there was greatness and compassion and cooperation.  It denies the core humanity of them all to suggest that they were not as flawed and as opportunistic as any other human beings born with free will.  Of course, it’s certainly not the first time that the Seattle Public Schools have demonstrated that they see very little past the color of one’s skin.

I’m not sure what’s worse, though – the “enlightened” rejection of the humanity of an entire race of people, or the fact that a tax funded institute of learning is so willfully ignorant of history, and so intent on forcing that ignorance on another generation of Seattleites.  Once of the strongest arguments against federal involvement with K-12 education is that every other tax payer in the country has to help pay for this absurdity, and yet most of them can’t even vote out the board members who squander their money on such PC rubbish.

I wonder if these board members, so ashamed of the culture in which they have been allowed to grow so well fed, well paid, and well housed in return for such minimal cerebral heavy lifting, will choose to give it up in order to not justify and profit from this supposed Thanksgiving Betrayal.  Turn off the lights and heat, toss the i-Pod in the garbage, and cook this Thursday’s dinner over an open flame!  Dinner itself will have to be self-obtained, of course – I hope they remembered to plant the maize on time this year.  Starbucks is right out to stay warm if it’s cold and rainy, as are the Gore-Tex garments.  No TV, no internet, an definitely no football.  Any traveling they might do should be limited to the bipedal kind, and all concrete and asphalt paths must of course be avoided as being the very symbol of the assault on the natural world.  And building new traditional living structures would be wasteful, but they could at least cram several dozen people into one house for a few days to enjoy the pre-betrayal American life.

Well, probably not.

Ultimately, you have to feel sorry for a people so intent on being miserable that they can only see the worst and most terrible things about living in the most prosperous, stable, opportunity-laden, and free society that the planet has ever known on the day when everyone else is simply being grateful for it all.  (Although I feel even more sorry for the children who are force fed that misery.)  Avoiding that pitiable state of self inflicted misery is perhaps the most important thing we should keep in mind this weekend.

In short, we are thankful that we live in this greatest of all countries, that we have a day free from work to celebrate that fact with our friends an families…

…and that we don’t still live in Seattle.