The day before Thanksgiving is always strange for me these days because I find myself reflecting on the odd contradictions between what I learned in school about Thanksgiving and America’s origins, and what I now know about our nation’s dark history.<\/p>\n
Like many nations, ours is a problematic one. We have beautiful aspirational ideals of freedom and equality, yet we emerged out of an historical soup of both genocide and a particularly brutal form of slavery.<\/p>\n
Is it possible to reconcile such extreme historical sins with the abstract promises of equality and freedom for all? I suppose this is the problem that faces much of the world, since many of the nations that exist today were forged out of conquest and subjugation of other peoples.<\/p>\n
Compounding this is the fact that for most people a collective amnesia about these inconvenient facts is a fundamental part of how they get through the day, the month and the year.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, tomorrow will be a time I get to hang out with family and play with my wonderful nieces and nephews. <\/p>\n
For that, I should remember to give thanks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The day before Thanksgiving is always strange for me these days because I find myself reflecting on the odd contradictions between what I learned in school about Thanksgiving and America’s origins, and what I now know about our nation’s dark history. Like many nations, ours is a problematic one. We have beautiful aspirational ideals of … Continue reading “The day before Thanksgiving”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21756"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21756"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21761,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21756\/revisions\/21761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}