Unfortunately, Squanto wasn't psychic. If he was, think of all the misery he could've saved his people.
But he wasn't. The Indians around Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts took
pity on the settlers from the Mayflower and essentially kept them alive.
Over the next four centuries, we repaid them with venereal disease and
small pox, massive land grabs, raids, fascist resident schools and
shunting them to reservations.
Because that's the way of the White Man and his Manifest Destiny.
And we're still seeing the same spirit today in mostly white corporate
executives who have nothing left to steal from Native Americans and have
moved on to the rest of us. Now they're after our pensions, our health
care, our very dignity and will to live and fight. A cabal of 150
corporate executives, one of them Obama's jobs czar Jeff Immelt, called
"Fix the Debt" is now busting a nut trying to raise the retirement age
to at least 70, get rid of overtime pay, grab what few pension funds
there are, freeze the minimum wage and God knows what else. Many of
these corporate scumbags already have retirement funds of $140,000,000
or more.
Now, K-Mart, Walmart and, for the first time ever,
Macy's is open today for business as well as hundreds if not thousands
of retailers. K-Mart opened at 6 this morning and will be at it for 41
straight hours and who cares if their employees want to spend
Thanksgiving with their families? According to the propaganda campaigns
of these corporations, it'll be a "high energy day" for "associates" who
just can't wait to forgo spending a major holiday with loved ones to
wait on manic, murderous customers who would stick a shiv between their
mother's ribs to get that extra 20% off on a plasma TV.
You think a single retail executive in this country is working on Thanksgiving?
And now, like the original colonists of 1620, many of us are fighting
for bare survival. Only it seems there's no Squanto to save us from
certain ruin. Our government quietly let the ARRA or Recovery Act lapse,
leaving millions with less food assistance and no subsidization for
their COBRA health coverage and millions will lose their unemployment
benefits unless Congress acts because they simply don't give a shit
about you. If you can't stuff millions in soft PAC money into their war
chests, unless you can wine and dine them at the Four Seasons or the
Pump Room or some other swanky restaurant, if you don't hold
$10,000-a-plate fundraisers or foot the bill for golf junkets at St.
Andrews, they want nothing to do with you. It is a government of the 1%,
by the 1% and for the 1%.
Like the executive scum who've
sent the word down to the regional, district and store levels that if
you don't work on Thanksgiving, you're fired.
So, Squanto and
his people are dead and gone and most of their descendants can't even
help themselves let alone us, not that they'd want to. We have just each
other, fellow human beings who are compassionate enough to look beyond
our ken and to sympathize with the plight of others less fortunate than
we. A certain Walmart store in Canton, Ohio proved that recently.
And if you're lucky as I am to be spending a quiet, peaceful
Thanksgiving with a loved one or loved ones, please give a silent prayer
or gesture of thanks to the people who are braving termination,
ridicule and the cold protesting the ongoing theft by the 1% of our most
basic ways and means of survival. Because they don't care about you any
more than do their temp workers in the federal government.