My sentiments, as well. -mackie

(source cited)

 ”Happy Thanksgiving. That is not a political sentiment. Yet this year, everything seems partisan and even this most unifying of national holidays has become an occasion for ideological warfare.

The idea now popular in conservative circles is that all past interpretations of Thanksgiving are tainted either by malign forms of multiculturalism—did those white colonists really need help from the Indians to get their act together?—or by dangerous inclinations to socialism.

Some of our friends on the ascending right wing insist that it’s a big lie to use Thanksgiving to celebrate how the Pilgrims pulled together and, with the help of God, prospered through communal assistance and a little help from their new neighbors. They buy the part about the Almighty but insist this holiday is primarily about the virtues of American capitalism and how free enterprise saved those folks at Plymouth.

The historian Rush Limbaugh has been pushing this view since 1993 when he published the definitive account in his book “See, I Told You So.” Year after year, he’s used his talk show to teach us that the settlers suffered because, at the outset, their land and their homes “belonged to the community.” As Limbaugh exclaimed on a 2007 show, “They were collectivists!”’

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 ”Now I want to be honest: Given what I do for a living and my own inclinations, I’m perfectly capable of politicizing all manner of issues, too. It’s also true that national holidays almost necessarily invite this sort of debate. We are, after all, celebrating something, and it shouldn’t surprise us that we’d tangle over exactly what that something is. Besides, having grown up in a politically diverse extended family, I have fond memories of Thanksgiving dinners being the staging ground for many a raucous debate. Why not argue about the holiday itself?

 Yet putting aside the dangers of allowing ideology to distort the facts of our present and our past, we seem to have lost our sense of balance as a country. This argument over Thanksgiving strikes me as a symptom of our failure to acknowledge that the American story is not all one thing or all another.

  It is, instead, a tale of a healthy and ongoing tension between our love of individualism and our reverence for community. Capitalism is part of our story, but so is solidarity and the idea that no one ever really “goes it alone.” Our rights are embedded in a web of social bonds and obligations that enrich us. We have a responsibility to take care of ourselves and our families, but also to look out for one another. And we hope that if we run into trouble, someone, maybe even the entire community, will look out for us.”

 For the entire article click on: 

 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_thanksgiving_wars_no_thanks_20101124/