A Thanksgiving Reflection (2 of 4) – Civil War/Civil Discussion: This Thursday Americans will celebrate Sharons favorite American holiday, Thanksgiving. She even decorates the house with wondrous creations like the leaves and pumpkins in the first photo. It is her favorite because it has all the warmth of Christmas, without any of the hassle, stress, and materialistic gift-buying. But each year brings back to our household the debate about when the “first” Thanksgiving really took place. Most Americans accept it as fact that the first Thanksgiving took place in Massachusetts in 1621, when the Pilgrims sat down for a three-day fest with some Native Americans. But as Sharon reminds me (her family is from the South!) there is strong and verifiable evidence that two years earlier, on December 4, 1619, the first official Thanksgiving had already taken place in Virginia. Well, there are some good reasons to focus on the Pilgrim event, especially since it included Native Americans, whereas the Virginia event only included the European settlers. But it would be naïve to think that this is the whole justification for ignoring the earlier event in Virginia. We were in the midst of our own Civil War when President Lincoln declared a national day of thanksgiving in 1863. It was convenient at that time to associate the day with the Massachusetts event since that state is in the North, and it would have been politically inconvenient to admit that the first real Thanksgiving was in Virginia, since at that time Virginia was the center of the “southern rebellion” against the Union. Then, even after the civil war, with all the bitterness and distrust it engendered, the Virginia event slipped further and further into obscurity and was almost completely lost to our national consciousness. This is a small thing. An almost forgotten thing. But it shows in its small, almost undetectable way how pervasive and overwhelming myths become. And myth-making and history-writing are almost always the monopoly of the victor. It is the winners who write the history books and who shape a nation’s cultural norms and traditions. One step toward true reconciliation in any country is an objective review of the facts, an impartial assessment of the past, and an honest and courageous determination to always look at things clearly and dispassionately.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 06:43:06 +0000