What Is Thanksgiving?

Tomorrow, most Americans will eat too much, numb their minds watching football games, gain a couple of pounds and then call it a day.  That is the current American tradition.  The fact that this modern American tradition is antithetical to the spiritual and cultural roots of the holiday is probably unknown to most and would probably make no difference even if the religious significance of the holiday was known.

The first Thanksgiving was celebrated by religious fundamentalists who came to America to escape state persecution and Native Americans who took pity on a group of starving strangers and taught them how to survive in a strange land.  The original harvest time celebration was a sign of gratitude to God for their survival and to the Native Americans that God used to make it happen. There was joy but also piety, humility and gratitude, attributes sorely lacking in modern American society.

Thanksgiving became a national observance during the civil war when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed: "No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union."

The typical Thanksgiving feast was something I never experienced in my youth.  We were poor and my Mom didn't really believe in making much of a fuss over holidays.  We might have had a piece of ham, some pork chops or maybe a chicken.  But, there were no huge family celebrations and lavish meals.  Usually it was just the three of us over a modest meal in our humble little kitchen.  But, there was thankfulness at the table.  We had a modest but adequate little house with a roof that kept us dry and a gas stove that kept us warm.  The gas stove was a luxury that some of our neighbors did not share.  We all had clothes that fit us, kept us warm and were decent enough to go out in.  There was plenty of food, even if it wasn't fancy.  We missed no meals.  We had a reliable car.  Those were all things my former sharecropper mother and "living on the road" Okie father often didn't have in their youth and they felt blessed to have them.

In the latter years of Mom's life we reverted to that pattern.  For the last fifteen or so years of her life, Mom refused to leave her home for holiday celebrations.  So, most years, Sheila and I would cook a turkey dinner at our home in Tulsa, put it in a ice chest to keep it warm and drive to Gans to eat it with Mom. Again, just three of us in Mom's humble little kitchen.  Sometimes she was grateful, sometimes she may not have been.  Mom was ill and her moods were a part of that illness. But, we did it anyway because the Thanksgiving meal is about more than having a good time and eating a good meal.  It is about faith, family, duty and honor.  I couldn't have enjoyed myself anywhere knowing that Mom was sitting alone while we celebrated.

In these past few years since Mom's death, I have had a lot of time to think about what I want from the Thanksgiving celebration.  I have no stomach for sanitized, secular, multi-cultural interpretations of a tradition with such profound Christian roots and I have no patience with people who try to force their secular corruption of one of America's most sacred religious traditions upon me.  And, for that matter, I can do without the football games and massive parades of inflated symbols of spiritual and moral emptiness. I want to freely and openly thank God for the multiple blessings he has bestowed upon us in the past year and humbly beseech his continued blessings in the year to come.  That's it. Without that, the whole tradition is nothing more than an empty exercise in gluttony and excess that I can do without.

On Sheepdogs and Liberal, Anti-Gun *ssholes

This morning, I was following and commenting on a post made by a Facebook friend lamenting the horrific killing and mutilation of 43 people by Mexican drug cartels. My FB friend is a professor and has a few liberals who follow her FB page as well.  True to the liberal playbook rules of: (1) never let a tragedy go to waste when you can spin it toward your own agenda; (2) always show America in a bad light and; (3) always blame it on your political opposition, this excuse for a person proceeded to compare the NRA to the Mexican drug cartels, implying that they were as responsible for the last American school shooting as the cartels were for the massacre being discussed.  I have to be careful when I reply to people like this because I know that answering a fool in his folly can be in itself a fool's mission.

I grew up on a rural Oklahoma ranch.  Guns were a part of our life.  The typical law enforcement response to a trouble call was sometimes measured in hours not minutes. My father's pistol was never far from reach wherever we went and there was always a wicked old double barrel shotgun on hand in the house.   The only reason any of us in that neighborhood and time were able to own cattle or anything else of value was because folks who would be tempted to steal knew that if they were caught in the act they were liable to be shot on the spot. For that matter, the only reason we were able to live on isolated acreages without fear of personal violence was because of our guns.  Samuel Colt was dead right when he called the pistol the "great equalizer."

By the time I was five, my combat veteran father had given me a pop gun replica of a 1903 Springfield and taught me how to knock down tobacco cans with it on the living room floor. He taught me the shooting positions of a combat rifleman.  He also stood me tall and made me do the complete manual of arms with it.  In the process he taught me rudimentary gun safety. By the time I was eight or so, I had a Daisy lever action BB gun. With that weapon came new responsibilities like never do damage to property and never torment or kill small animals.  At twelve or so I had a bolt action .22 rifle.  With it came more rules like watch behind your target and don't shoot a living creature unless it's a varmint or you are going to eat it.

There was never a question whether or not I would serve in the military, only when and what branch. In the world my father raised me in, men of honor served when called.  All of my father's close friends were veterans.  All of my uncles on his side were veterans.  Men of my father's generation who didn't have a darned good reason for not serving were not respected. In short, in my father's generation men were expected to be "sheepdogs."  They were expected to serve the nation and their community if necessary and also be individually capable of protecting their families, themselves and their property.  They were expected to be men of honor, courage and discipline who could be trusted with a firearm.  That was the right given to them by Second Amendment and the duty imposed upon them by that right.


The men of my father's generation were a force to be reckoned with.  You were polite to these men and they were polite to you because both sides knew that, despite their usually genial manner and easy going attitude, they had long ago proven that they were also capable of incredible courage and, if necessary, lethal violence when the situation called for it. Many of them, like my father, had little pieces of metal and ribbon to prove it.

I have nothing but pity and disgust for this new class of American man that does not share the traditional American male "sheepdog" values.  I pity them because they did not have a sheepdog father to teach them these values.  I pity them because they probably did not have the honor of serving their country in uniform.  And, I pity them because, at whatever age they have now attained, they have yet to take responsibility for their own and their family's safety.

I have nothing but loathing for people who would disarm civilian sheepdogs because they are afraid of their fangs.  I suspect that these political and cultural castrati fear armed citizens because of the deep fears, hatreds and anxieties in their own hearts. Having never been taught the honor, self control and discipline of the sheepdog culture, they project their own fear, hatred and inadequacy upon everyone else.

I have a message for the cultural castrati of our generation.  The only reason they are able to mouth their whining, bitter little diatribes and psuedo intellectual fallacies is because good men are protecting them.  They sleep better at night in their homes because the predators in their community don't know whether the house is occupied by a member of the ideological victim class like themselves or a sheepdog that will shoot them the minute they break through the door.  They are free to walk the streets in comparative safety and mouth their destructive drivel on street corners and in classrooms only because a better man is somewhere nearby to take on the duty of protecting them. The bottom line here is that the new cultural castrati can just kiss my *ss.  If they really want our guns ....