Replace Thanksgiving Day With Median Age Day — Let Us All Be Thankful!
It was 1958. I was a kid. With my ball glove looped to my belt, I’d often ride my bike, bat handcuffed to the handlebar, a couple of miles to the local Little League Field for some serious ball playing. When there was no organized game we’d play in the nearby field, making up variations of baseball due to limitations of our ‘stadium.’
But always my friends and I would get to go home where our mothers cooked wholesome meals and the fridge was always full. Our fathers, sole breadwinners of our families, would always come home tired from a hard day working. But they’d always came home proud with a feeling of accomplishment, knowing their work was valued and appreciated by a family full of love and meaning.
I was raised, we were living deep in the midst of “The American Dream.” My school featured all sports where equipment was provided, there was cub scouts or boy scouts, pee-wee football, church picnics, parades and very great holiday celebrations with the relatives … we had it all!
Given education was once well-funded, possibilities of attending college were real and affordable. Everybody had healthcare at the municipal hospital and many families drove two cars. Hope remained. Society was for the better and the vast majority of people were very much in tune behind the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts and a declared war on poverty. Many of us heard, felt and were inspired from the ring of freedom professed by the heart and voice of Martin Luther King.
But then came The Vietnam War. The war dragged on — everything began to change ….
The War Drags On by Donovan - Steemit
One of the best protest songs ever! by michaelweddle
steemit.com
Now, 60 years and lots of war later, comes Thanksgiving week 2018. There’s no question this approaching ‘Turkey Day’ doesn’t feel quite the same. This is for lots of reasons. Important among them is not only have we witnessed the destruction of America’s middle class, but there’s a simple fact of reality what America does today, as a nation, brings forward few reasons for being thankful.
America has evolved into promulgating war, racism, religious intolerance, greed, environmental ignorance, rigged elections and social deprivation. Our nation now functions as an oligarchy where the media is control-monopolized and six-digit salaried lobbyists and consultants hold sway and influence over nearly all our politicians.
“Of the people, by the people and for the people” has morphed into “of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation.” The need to “Live Together or Die” has become supplanted with a false though well-meaning slogan of “Live Free or Die.” Sadly, the freedom has been taken, and very few folks act as though they’re really wish to live together — even during the holidays which now have become fully commercialized.
Indeed, Thanksgiving has always been a bad day for turkeys.
But also Thanksgiving, which follows Columbus Day, remains a bad day, one of intimidation, for Native-Americans who lost their land, the ways of their land and who suffered from a massive genocide placed upon them by Anglo-Americans (see annual National Day of Mourning Protest in Plymouth, Massachusetts).
It’s also a bad day for American soldiers away from their families on military bases in foreign lands (US has over 900 such bases). Often they are stationed where dictatorial governments reign, where Indigenous People — especially those who live in areas of rainforest — become irrelevant and severely repressed by America’s corporate insatious want for more resources.
America is today keeping pace with what it long ago did to Native-Americans: Taking land and capturing resources like oil, diamonds, gold, silver, copper, tin, timber, rubber, lithium or whatever. Worse, slave labor is used in the process. There’s a profiteering and geopolitical reason why America provides weaponry to 73% of today’s dictatorial governments!
Citizens of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Syria understand the pain of what it’s like to live in a country with a median age in the low-20s. In Africa, it ranges from 15 to 20 years of age … but, on balance, nobody seems to care. The holidays for these families are nothing like what Americans experience, even with today’s thin pickings.
Because the oligarchs play greedy the dream option does not exist for other nations. Today, America no longer has its dream.
Sadly, the greedy indicators for America are the GDP, The Dow and how well it can do with emerging markets, plus its sports teams must make money. America, with a median age of 38.1, could care less about the median age of other nations. Perhaps, however, it should pay attention to the median age of Cuba, a revolutionary democracy, which sports a median age of 41.5. Cuba also plays very good baseball!
Thanksgiving is also a tough day for poor folk who no longer celebrate the holiday as they once did in the past, back when turkeys and vegetables on the table came from real home-grown farms instead of corporate, low wage-paying farms. Many of the ole’ farms from yesteryear are today condominiums! Very few farmers today get to take pride in their land which increasingly is endangered problems concerning top soil erosion, drought and often environmental effects from pollution.
Do pesticides make the turkeys grow bigger?
What’s on your table?
Finally, maybe it’s a better idea to replace the ThanksGiving holiday with a new one: Median Age Day! This way, at least we really will be thinking of others!
For this, many would be the ones who become thankful!
