the danger of gratitude.

It’s been small but it feels like the controversy over Thanksgiving is getting bigger - as in we can’t celebrate it or say the name anymore.

I don’t agree at all, but I do think there is an inherent danger in gratitude - which is not something that you hear very often. Or at least not something I hear very often.

Despite all of the benefits of gratitude, of which there are too many to name, there is one pretty big disadvantage: the assumption that because we are thankful for something, the thing we are thankful for must be good. Or, because we are thankful, we must be right.

These are subtle and subconscious and never overtly expressed (which makes them all the more dnagerosu_ but worth thinking about - and I think the reason that people are more upset with the whole concept of thanksgiving - even if it’s sometimes hard to name. Just because some people sat around (in a mostly fictional meal) and ate with the indigenous people they would go on to kill and steal from while spouting words of gratitude for the land they had been given, doesn’t make any of it right.

Just because a bunch of Americans will thank god for that same land and the continued “bounty” from it tomorrow doesn’t make any of it right. Or us right. Or it good.

People are grateful for all kinds of hideous and terrible things every day that stay hideous and terrible even though people express gratitude.

So, hell yeah be grateful. But, in addition to being grateful it might be worth taking a second to think about what exactly we are thankful for, and why, and how, and whether it is good.

Happy Thanksgiving.