That for which I am thankful

Their lives being so personally miserable, the Usual Suspects on the left want to make normal people’s lives miserable, too, combitching that the holiday should be renamed ‘Truthsgiving’, and too-numerous-to-count articles telling leftists how to ‘survive’ a family get-together in which an irascible uncle — or perhaps even most of the family — are, Heaven forfend!, MAGAts and Trump voters.

Our English forebears sailed to this continent, settled, and in the process pushed out, forced out, and even exterminated the Indians who were here before them. I’m fortunate enough to have had some work done on researching my maternal family tree, and it turns out that my earliest American ancestor, Richard Warren, who arrived on these shores on the Mayflower, was almost certainly at that first Thanksgiving.

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain, Thanksgiving and the Meaning of America

But that got me to thinking: just what sacrifices were made by other people for me to be here. I am alive today because 36,634 American soldiers gave their lives for me to be here.

What’s that? If it was not for the Korean War, the chances that my mother, who grew up in Portland, Maine, and my father, a third generation son of Portuguese immigrants living on Mau’i, would have met in Tokyo in 1951 would have been virtually zero. My father was with the Army Corps of Engineers and my mother was a WAC working in General of the Army Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters. 36,634 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines poured out their lives’ blood in the war that brought my parents together.

Of course, there’s more. There were 407,316 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who were killed in World War II, a war we entered only because Japan attacked us, and without our conquest of Japan, General MacArthur would not have had a headquarters in Tokyo at all. Japan had conquered Korea early on in the Pacific war, and without American participation in that war, Japan would have continued ruling Korea for decades to come.

My home? Our small farm is 37.4 road miles from Boonesborough, the first white settlement in Kentucky. Were it not for the defeat and expulsion of the Shawnee and Cherokee Indians, this wouldn’t be our home.

Brad Lopes, photo via Instagram.

Michael La Corte of Salon wrote about the whining of Brad Lopes, Director of Wampanoag and Indigenous Interpretation and Training at Plimoth Patuxet Museums, and his complaint that our Thanksgiving tradition about the communal harvest celebration between the settlers at Plymouth and the Wampanoag Indians is all a horrible, horrible lie. Mr Lopes describes himself a as member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, but looking at both his name and his photo, it seems as though he wouldn’t be here either were it not for a significant amount of Caucasian ancestry.

Perhaps he’s more of an Indian than Senator Elizabeth Warren?

As much as the left wish to scream “Decolonization!” they ought to realize, ought to be made aware of, that not only their homes and property are on conquered land — homes and property none seem all that eager to turn back to the Indians! — but that they, personally, exist today because of primarily English settlement and later European immigration to North America.
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