Doug Reveiws Thanksgiving

Disclaimer: This post is written for an open minded audience. It is written to be entertaining, not enlightening or accusatory or informational. It is written lightly, if you feel this is not the kind of thing for you, I hold no hard feelings if you pass on reading.

 I once had an idea that I would write a short story about an ancient king named Golumba. In my story, Golumba would be a good and decent king. The people throughout his land would love and respect him. Peace and harmony would reign.

Soon enough, however, barbaric savages would invade from the south. They would start by cutting off supply trains and eliminating the ability for the kingdom of Golumba to do any sort of trade. Then they attack small villages, raping and murdering every resident.

The savages would send messages to King Golumba, with the severed heads of his faithful subjects serving as the container carrying the messages. The message was always the same, one of death, destruction and a bloody end to the kingdom.

Eventually, through laying a horrible siege to the imperial city, the savages would obtain their victory. King Golumba would be forced to watch as his wife, children and grandchildren were all ravaged and brutalized before being tortured and eventually murdered. He could do nothing. The savages would not let him die.

Worse than death, they wanted king Golumba to live with the pain and misery of their actions. These savages would be completely unredeemable in my story. They would banish the king to the sea. Golumba, so wise and peaceful, would turn raw and maniacal during all these events. He’d become bloodthirsty and swear an oath upon the heads of the savages.

Now to King Golumba, an oath is the most sacred of things. For 400 days he would drift alone on the open seas, all the while plotting his revenge. He created parchment from his torn and tattered clothes, and wrote the history of his people on the parchment with his own blood.

After the 400^th day at sea, King Golumba would strike land. He would put his plan into action immediately. He began to rebuild. He created a small bit of wealth and married a young girl. She would give birth to a son. King Golumba would tell his son the story of his people, and pass on the sacred parchment of blood, asking his son to swear the same oath of revenge.

The king would grow old and die. His son, however, burned with the oath he had sworn to avenge his family. He would marry and have a son, to whom he would pass the story, the parchment and oath.

This would go on for two thousand years, as each new Golumba son would take on the oath, the plan, and the parchment. One day, King Golumba’s five hundredth great grandson, Cristofer, would finally put the plan into action. He went before the queen, asking for money, supplies, armies and boats, under the guise of finding new trade routes to India.

At sea, his men would notice the increasing madness of Cristofer Golumba, and the fragile parchment he grasped constantly between his fingers.

After  many days at sea, the call of land being spotted would draw Golumba starboard, where he would see for the first time the land he had been told of so many times. He would look out at America, look down at his parchment, and then under his breath he would grumble the words, “Now I bring a great plague of men, armies, sickness and destruction upon this land. Now I will avenge my forefathers.”

And fade to black. We know the rest of the story.

Anyway, I had plans to write this story, really fill it in with details, and use it as a way to sort of revise history to help me somehow come to grips with the destruction of Native Americans in this land. If somehow we could rewrite the history to make it seem like they had it coming, it would make what we’ve done to Natives a little easier to swallow, right?

But now it is Thanksgiving time and I’m white. I usually like to celebrate the season by making friends with as many Native American families as I can find. I try to get close enough to them that they feel comfortable with me inviting them over for Thanksgiving dinner.

Here’s where it gets really good. The night before Thanksgiving, I give them the wrong address to my house. The next day while they are out searching for my fake home, I sneak into their double wide and steal all the good stuff I can find and then burn the stuff that appears to have no value. Finally, as a peace offering, I leave them a case of Jack Daniels and a box of small pox spiders.

Each year, this puts me in the holiday spirit and makes my turkey taste a little juicier.

Okay, obviously I’m exaggerating. I don’t really do all those things. It would be silly, because Thanksgiving is not actually the day we celebrate the complete destruction of Native American life and our dominance over them as a race. No, we celebrate those things every day of the year.

I’ll stop now. I’m unfairly grouping all white people into taking the blame for the actions of some really crappy white people. But the facts remain, and this creates an annual conundrum for me. I am now forced to do a lot of really good and enjoyable things while skillfully blocking a lot of suffering from my mind.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!