RETHINKING: Thanksgiving in Black and White

Dear Friends:

Today across all the United States, we celebrate Thanksgiving Day, an important holiday with roots in the past of the country and in the first immigrants who started to build this great nation.

At the current moment, for a lot of Americans, Thanksgiving is a big dinner or lunch with a lot of food and people around talking and eating a good turkey dish.

But really, is this, Thanksgiving? We will not read again the books of history that explain the origins of this celebration. However, we have the obligation to rethink the meaning of Thanksgiving in the right way.

The "turkey dish" is a superficial way of thinking about Thanksgiving,  more now that there are people who cannot afford a reasonable dish of food every day.

The humanity is going ahead in a lot of aspects, but the inequality and the social problems are growing too. And the problems are not only located in Rohingya, Libya, Syria or the African desert.

Here, in America we find people who cannot afford a decent life because they are discriminated despite their qualifications and personal efforts. The discrimination doesn’t have race, sex or age. And not all the people who have bad incomes are lazy individuals or without qualification.

After the financial crisis of 2007/09, thousands and maybe millions of American citizens had to accept jobs for less than their qualifications. The illegal immigration helped to push down the labor market.

We are living now in a world where the human values are counted by the cars, houses and banking accounts the people have. This is not an exclusive problem of America. In Europe and other countries, we find the same social problems.

Despite the gloomy landscapes that we described in the previous paragraphs, we have motifs to say: “Thank you!” And we have to say “Thank you!” more frequently.

We have to be grateful with who help us. How many times, we are in front the abyss but we don’t fall because an invisible “angel” stops us in the right place?

Thanksgiving celebration is one of the key days in the year to rethink the good and bad thing of our lives. This is a right moment to recognize who are our good friends, and who deserve we help them.

The world is tired of wars, hate and brutal attacks against innocent people. The world is tired of abuses against the human dignity. The world is tired of the superficiality of the individuals who only see through the screen of a smart-phone or the windshield of a fancy car. Thanksgiving is one of the opportunities to rethink our world in a positive way and go ahead.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Domingo A. Trassens

Email: d.a.trassens@gmail.com

WORLD RETHINK

Rethinking the world with you

http://world-rethink.blogspot.com/

Twitter page:

https://twitter.com/trassens

(More than 22.6K tweets posted)

Wall Street Journal – Journal Community page:

http://www.wsj.com/user/personalization/profile (Domingo Trassens)

(More than 11,400 recommendations received from other members since the new Journal Community started in 2014 and 7900 in the previous JC.)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SOURCES:

Internal Sources: My previous studies of philosophy, history and humanities.

External Sources: My interaction with other Twitter writers about nature, environment, culture, labor discrimination, inequality and other social illnesses.

Website: http://world-rethink.blogspot.com/