Taking Aim at Thanksgiving
by Gary Bauer

11/28/2008 Print This

As you begin to come out of your tryptophan-induced coma, here’s an easy bit of Thanksgiving trivia.

Thanksgiving is:

A) A day to celebrate the coming together of Puritans and Indians to give thanks to God for a successful harvest. Continued
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B) A time of mourning and cultural self-flagellation.

The answer may seem straightforward. But it’s not, according to the activist Left. Having done all it can to turn Christmas into merely a winter retail festival and to scrub Easter of all its religious meaning (that is, all its meaning), the Left has opened up another front in the culture war by taking dead aim at Thanksgiving.

And, as usual, the Left has honed in on students as the most likely converts to its pessimistic point of view. In more and more public schools, students are no longer taught the historical facts about the Pilgrims and American Indians, no longer simulate Mayflower voyages or hold feasts to commemorate the coming together of these two very different groups.


[b]Instead, in many schools Thanksgiving has become a day of mourning, a time to focus on the left’s interpretation of the Native Americans’ experiences. Last year, the Seattle School District sent a letter to its teachers warning them that, “Thanksgiving can be a difficult time for many native students.â€