Thanksgiving Attacked

At Condit Elementary School, in Claremont, California, a forty year tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving was attacked by a handful of angry liberals, and the school caved to their demands.

Two elementary schools in Claremont, Condit and Mountain View, used to take turns dressing up as Pilgrims and Indians and visiting the other’s school for a Thanksgiving feast. Thanks largely to Michelle Raheja, and a handful of followers, that tradition has been deemed politically incorrect. Although the meal took place, the children were told not to dress up.

Michelle Raheja claims that dressing up and celebrating Thanksgiving is “demeaning,” that it is akin to asking children to “dress up like slaves (and kind slave masters), or Jews (and friendly Nazis).”

The truth of the matter is that a harvest festival did take place between the Pilgrims and Native Americans, or Indians, as they were then called. At that point in time, the Pilgrims were friendly with the native people, who willingly gave their help and expertise in teaching the Pilgrims to survive in a new land. They did indeed teach the Pilgrims how to plant corn, catch the fish and eels of the area, and hunt in the forests. Without the help of the Native Americans, the Pilgrims would most likely have perished. There was a peace treaty established between the Wampanoag Indians and the Pilgrims that lasted for fifty years.

It is also true that the costumes public school children are taught to make more closely resemble the clothing worn by the Plains Indian tribes, rather than how the Wampanoag Indians would have dressed. Michelle could have better utilized her time by volunteering to teach the children what an authentic Wampanoag outfit might have looked like, and helping to make the celebration more historically correct. She might have helped prepare dishes that the Pilgrims and Wampanoag might have actually shared at their feast. They might have discussed the Pilgrim dress as well- during colonial times, young boys and girls both wore long dresses. It was not until the age of six that young boys would begin to wear breeches like those that their fathers wore.

Instead, she wants to overlook the peace that was shared between two cultures during the time of the festival and instead focus on the barbaric actions that took place later. Considering that her objection is to the dressing up of children as “Indians,” and she seems to have no objection to the children dressing as Pilgrims, I would have to assume that she would also choose to focus on the Native Americans as victims of violence, when there was, by historical account, abhorrent atrocities perpetrated by both sides.

Following Ms. Raheja’s logic, when socialism has done to America what it has done to many nations in the past, we will no longer be allowed to discuss what a great, democratic country in which we once lived.

The truth of the past will be obscured by the horrors of the socialism that followed.

Photo by dkaz.