Every year, millions of Americans sit down on Thanksgiving to binge on pumpkin pie and give thanks to ESPN. Families gather to argue over which uncle will eat the liver of the turkey and whether or not the Eagles will beat the Cardinals.
Thanksgiving began in the fall of 1621 where the original story says the Pilgrims shared a communal dinner with the Native Americans to show thanks for teaching them how to grow crops to help them survive in a new land.
The feast continued for three days and was eaten outside. It was repeated in 1623, and again in 1676. In October 1777, all thirteen colonies celebrated Thanksgiving to mark the victory over the British.
In 1863, it was declared a national holiday by President Lincoln.
Thanksgiving is a day to be thankful for our blessings and cherish the time spent with family. Thanksgiving successfully does this by ignoring the oppression given to the Native American culture by obese Americans indulging in growth-hormone enhanced turkeys.
While the story may be true about the Pilgrims and the Native Americans sharing a feast as a sign of thanks, the Pilgrims paid them back with gunshots and disease.
In 1622, the year after the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims harvest was small once again. The Native Americans offered an exchange, but when the Pilgrims did not uphold their side of the bargain, hostilities began to flare.
Colonists thanked the Native Americans with numerous massacres, relocations, seizing lands, violating their beliefs and burial sites, and forcing the tribes to move further and further west with treaties.
Within 20 years of the original Thanksgiving, the Wampanoags who helped the Pilgrims, were demolished from disease. The European animals brought cowpox, which soon turned into smallpox, one of the plagues that decimated the Native Americans. This disease accounted for almost 90 percent of deaths in some Native American communities.
People today repress this hidden story behind Thanksgiving by gorging themselves on ridiculous amounts of turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce.
The turkeys eaten on Thanksgiving are bred for their breast meat; the heavy birds they have trouble standing, and have poorly developed legs and hips. They can’t fly and can barely walk.
The birds are genetically similar so they are more vulnerable to disease and cannot produce without the help of artificial insemination. Instead of being fed a diet of nuts, grass, and grains, they are stuffed with food that is high in protein, and usually contains some of the slaughterhouse leftovers.
The turkeys are raised in windowless sheds with 10,000 other birds that leaves them less than three square feet per turkey. The shed is full of waste that leads to foot ulcers and air filled with ammonia that leads to disease.
In some turkey farms, the birds are debeaked so they will not peck one another.
In one investigation of a Thanksgiving turkey farm, the manager was found on tape beating the birds with sticks, pulling them with pliers, and wringing their necks.
After the birds spend their lives under these conditions, they are taken to a slaughterhouse where they are blasted with a tazer before their throats are cut. These turkeys are then cleaned, packaged, and put on grocery store shelves where millions of American’s purchase the birds and eat them to show the American way of saying thanks.
Next Thursday when you have to unsnap your pants, remember to give thanks to the Native Americans that the Pilgrims took for granted and the turkeys whose purpose in life is to feed an American until they spew.
Happy Thanksgiving.