History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books – books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon? The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

I used to think Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, and maybe it still is, but Fall is not my favorite season and this year seems especially fallish. Fall; the days get shorter and the nights get colder. Life gets slightly harder. Now, Thanksgiving, itself, is increasingly taking on the role of reminding us that we took this land away from its original owners. There were people here before the Europeans arrived we did take the land and made the original owners live on shit land and, as a nation, we are slowly starting to own up to what we did. What we are going to really do about what we did is a different story.

A good place to start is to admit that there is more than one history of the United States. There are different stories from different viewpoints and they are all valid. Replacing the White Western European fable as the Agreed Upon Fable with another fable that everybody has to agree to is just going to take us down the rathole of victimhood. Replacing one set of bad guys with a new set of bad guys is not going to bring justice or resolution. It will just bring a new set of angers and resentments.

So this year, in a growing, changing world, Michele and I wish everybody a Happy and Thoughtful Thanksgiving.