Build a Longer Table

                                                        

 First, I wish you a happy Thanksgiving. It’s an opportunity for us to give thanks as well as to celebrate Indigenous peoples. And to extol our common good — the ideals that bind us together, rather than the xenophobia, racism, and misogyny that pull us apart. 

The Thanksgiving holiday is also an opportunity to become reenergized for the historic fight we face in coming months, when the anti-democracy forces of neofascism and bigotry seek to take over America. 

Please try to avoid two large traps that some people are already falling into: 

Denial. Some don’t want to accept that these anti-democracy forces are significant and growing, that Donald Trump has a realistic chance of being reelected president notwithstanding his attempted coup and upcoming criminal trials, and that if he succeeds, everything we believe in will be seriously threatened. 

But unless we see this for what it is, we cannot possibly summon the energy and determination necessary to stop Trumpist neofascism. 

Cynicism. Others are not in denial about the stakes ahead, but they are cynical that anything can be done to stop Trump and Trumpism from succeeding. They have basically given up on America. 

But cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we give up, the anti-democracy movement wins. And if we lose our democracy, there is nothing we are able to do — reverse climate change or combat widening inequality or overcome institutional racism or avoid nuclear war or reduce any of the other existential threats we face. 

So let us use this day of gratitude to recommit ourselves to fighting for our ideals — for democracy, inclusion, tolerance, decency, and social justice — and refuse to be trapped by denial or cynicism. 

My best wishes to you and yours. 

Robert Reich, 

Thank a Farm Worker

This Thanksgiving thank a farm worker

Happy Thanksgiving. We want to extend our warm thanks to you for being our loyal supporter and helping farm workers. As our families prepare to gather around the Thanksgiving table, we want to ask everyone to take a second to thank the men and women who labor to put the food on our Thanksgiving tables, and whose labor feeds us all year long. These hard working people labor day after day behind the scenes in heat, cold and rain to harvest the food that ends up in supermarkets and eventually on your table.

Join us in recognizing them and letting them know we appreciate everything they do, by signing the online Thanksgiving card our organizers will share with our members at their various farms and dairies. Please take an extra 30 seconds and add your own personal message.

UFW members are marking this Thanksgiving holiday season with a campaign they launched at their latest gathering of worker leadership. Members from Coachella, Ventura County, San Joaquin Valley, Monterey County, Sonoma County, and Oregon and Washington states have taken their message about the benefits of having a union contract out to their communities and social media. “From Our Hands to Your Tables” highlights their stories and the work they do every day.

To follow this campaign go to: https://www.facebook.com/unitedfarmworkers/ and https://twitter.com/UFWupdates or look for our #ThankAFarmWorker and #WeFeedYou hashtags on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 

Thanksgiving- A Troubled History

by RODOLFO ACUÑA

By far the “the king of the holidays” is Thanksgiving. The narrative has been burned into our consciousness to the point that few Americans question the facts because no one wants to lay the proverbial intellectual pedo.

Almost everyone is grateful for the day off. Merchants love Thanksgiving. It is the perfect opening act for Christmas.

The ritual of sitting down with the family to eat cheap turkey, chucked full of hormones, has been immortalized by Norman Rockwell. It is a day when you eat cheap turkeys and hams and everyone can pig out.

Not much thought is given to the truth of the narrative. Kids just want their four day relief from school, and parents are smug in the belief that the colonist and the Indians lived in peace. The only ones that care about changing the narrative are Native Americans who call it a National Day of Mourning.

I call Thanksgiving “El Día de los Pendejos” (The Day of the Fools). I tell my students to enjoy making graveyards out of their stomachs that they fill with the flesh of turkeys that have been held prisoners in small dirty cages.

Why do I call the Indians fools? Because they should have let the Pilgrims starve.

Few people know that the tradition of Thanksgiving was invented during the Civil war by President Abraham Lincoln in October 1863 when he proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday. Thereafter, the myth of the Pilgrims and the Indians was constructed.

The story is known by almost every American. For twelve years, from K-12, they learn the story of that in the early autumn of 1621 fifty-three surviving Pilgrims celebrated a successful harvest. The natives joined the celebration and instead of attacking the Pilgrims they made peace.

The Indians were thanked: their land was stolen from them, they were massacred, and many lived out their lives in slavery. The consequence is that less than one percent of Americans have Native American blood, contrasted to 90 percent of Mexican Americans with indigenous blood.