Pilgrim

thank you in 465 languegesMy ancestors came over on the Mayflower and we know this from my grandmother's long work into our genealogy, and on both my grandmother and grandfathers side of my father's side (turns out they were not so distantly related from one anothher... ahem).

So some of my ancestors landed with the Mayflower and stayed on the East Coast until that generation. My grandmother was fond of pointing out that pilgrims and puritans are not the same thing, being a devoted Maine-iac and liberal.

I have always liked Thanksgiving, a celebration of Thanks which my family has celebrated continuously, more or less (who knows), for hundreds of years now.

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Of course there is the hypocrisy of the fact that European-Americans went on to kill indians for decades unto century subsequently, all the while celebrating the kindness of the coastal Indians!  

I believe hypocrisy is the One Sin.  There is no other sin, really, that does not follow from this. I have a faith that if you hold to your principles without hypocrisy, applying them equally to yourself as well as others, that value systems work out.  For one, you will find errors in your "world-view"... you will find out the problems it has by discovering there is no way to apply it without being hypocritical, and you will feel compelled to modify it, if "not being hypocritical" is your One Moral Goal.

It's a faith.

But progressives want to improve things, their knowledge, their environment, themselves, and so this means that in fact we have ideals which we do not yet meet! That means we will speak values we have not yet achieved.  

That means that we all have some amount of this sin, we all are either hypocritical or self-satisfyingly set in our ways... dogmatic.

My belief in skepticism is really just a way out of that cycle, where "hypocrisy" is replaced with "humility" and "honesty"... but it comes to the same thing functionally, we are all dealing with our hypocrisies... but the ideals remind us where we want to go.

We want to be thankful for the Indian kindness, we want to live up to that, we obviously haven't yet, and Thanksgiving is a reminder of how we ought to feel about the matter. It makes it all the more painful, the genocide... it reminds us pretty well of the whole story, though I know some think it helps us forget. Some individuals might put on an indian headdress of construction paper and forget, but culturally, no, it's stored in the structure of history and tradition. So many genocides on the earth have been forgotten, we must preserve memory of those we can, and Thanksgiving is a monument to progress in that way.

We should give thanks, we should give thanks to kindness, we should act in kindness, and be thankful for our selves when we do.

Happy Thanksgiving.