The Meaning of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a time of celebration for the bountiful feast between American settlers and Native Americans, before the slaughter of course.  The way we celebrate this is by eating enormous amounts of food and giving thanks for all that we have.  America is known for consuming enormous amounts of everything and we're supposed to be thankful for that, meanwhile this over-consumption causes many problems such as overfilling landfills and using up many natural resources.

This is also the idea behind Black Friday, we all buy extreme amounts of material possessions to make us happy but we don't give back.  We buy buy buy to forget about the bigger things going on, we focus on the ipod on sale instead of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also choose to ignore the impact we have on our environment, we ignore all of our flaws by distracting ourselves with gifts and remaining optimistic about the things we do have and not focusing on what we can change.     

America also wants you to be thankful for the work they put into killing the natives and taking their land, without them we wouldn't be here and without their lack of immunity to small pox we wouldn't have their land.  America tends to do horrible things like storm into other countries and solve problems that weren't researched beforehand, and cover them up with humanitarian acts.  There are many examples of this, we invaded and bombed Iraq and then we dropped food, naturally we remember the humanitarian act before the slaughter.  The pilgrims raped and killed many native americans but we choose to remember the feast before that.

In short Thanksgiving is learning "hide the negatives" and be thankful for the positives.  While optimism is nice, we can't ignore our mistakes and problems, America like a small child needs to learn to take responsibility for it's actions and Thanksgiving is a step back in this case because we ignore our flaws altogether and we don't try to improve ourselves.       

Election Reactions

While I was watching the election, mainly the last speech made by Obama, I was overjoyed and inspired and interested.  I wanted to see how these next few years would turn out and what would happen.  I know that Obama is much smarter than president Bush so these next few years will definitely be better than Bush's terms.  However I think Obama promised a lot and I don't think he'll be able to accomplish all of it in 4 years of office (hopefully 8).  However I think he'll be able to do a lot of good for the country even if he can't do everything that he promised.

Having a black president will inspire many blacks and other minorities to succeed and take part in politics and other fields that were before dominated by white men.  Hopefully his presidency alone will change how America acts socially and inspires equality on a personal level.  While this is all great I'm concerned with his safety.  During McCain's speech the crowd booed and some shouted "kill him" when McCain said that Obama was a good man.  I expect many assassination plots to be made, hopefully unsuccessful.  Overall his presidency alone leaves me hopeful and eager to see not only how Obama leads the country but how other minorities will achieve more following his example.