Thanksgiving: celebrating the privilege to forget

[ellenrr]

So on this thanksgiving, we are all American. We must all sit at the dinner table and choose forgetfulness: “Don’t bring up politics and rain on everyone’s parade. This holiday isn’t about ethnic cleansing; it’s about sharing and giving thanks now.”

In many regards, those at the table are free: free from concern about losing property as it is appropriated in land grabs by the state, free from the burden of considering racial, gender, and legal-status categories as crucial determinants in ability to survive.

It is a freedom that provides suburban families central air while people of the Navajo nation choke on coal dust. Capitalism eats the lives of occupied peoples, collateral damage in a process of wealth accumulation. Our industries seep up, contaminate the ground water that once sat fresh and clean beneath what is left of the Navajo lands, so that America can maintain a healthy middle class with access to affordable electricity.

Black lives are cut short with the shot of a police gun, the poison of an unjust food system, countless violences of inherited dispossession and systemic racism. Beyond territorial borders, the finances of the American colonial project, for which so many nice families are thankful, fund the ammunition of other colonies, where other colonized people continue to resist the encroachment of capitalism’s beneficiaries.

http://roarmag.org/2015/11/thanksgiving-america-colonial-history/

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Yes and no, but mostly yes.

In many regards, those at the table are free: free from concern about losing property as it is appropriated in land grabs by the state, free from the burden of considering racial, gender, and legal-status categories as crucial determinants in ability to survive.

The things mentioned in the article happen less often to 'those around the table', but they do happen, and will happen more often if the twin 'privileges' of 'forgetfulness' and 'turning a blind eye' are 'enjoyed'. Fascism starts with minorities, with the poor and the marginalized, but if it is allowed to do so, it eventually comes for everyone else as well. The 'privilege' of 'being able to ignore injustice' is merely sticking one's head in the sand and pretending that inaction does not lead to worse injustice.

Capitalism is the heart and soul of hatred and exploitation. 'The love of money is the root of all evil'. And the temporary illusion that those in suburbia are not also going to be collateral damage in the exploitative damage that capitalism produces is just that, an illusion. They have a few more creature comforts, but their water is tainted, their food twisted in the name of almighty profit. They are poisoned and lied to and led and lulled into a false sense of security by those who proclaim that real progress is possible if only government will unshackle capitalism to run free, that 'market forces' will do what they have never in history done - deliver a good life to all - instead of what they always do, what they are designed to do - funnel wealth into the pockets of the few by exploiting the misery of the many.

Those with the least power are hurt the most and the most obviously, but everyone who isn't one of the elite few is merely grist for the mill, fooling themselves if they're not fighting against the power of Mammon to rule, fighting the oligarchy and its handmaidens of pain and suffering.

[silenttigersong]

2. I call it

Happy Thankstaking.

[niyad]

3. k and r