Posted on 11/25/2005 8:29:21 AM PST by dukeman
They're slipping.
Usually during the run up to Thanksgiving I'll see a weekful of letters to the editor decrying the barbarity of the holiday and condemning turkey genocide. These always put me in the holiday spirit, since the only "right" a turkey has is the right to be delicious on my table!
But there were no letters this year! Where were all the writers, in a ditch outside Crawford, Texas? Fortunately, one person did oblige. The following is from my local paper's Thanksgiving Day edition. Brighten my day. Post similar items from your local newspaper.
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More than one turkey pardoned
This Thanksgiving, President Bush will have pardoned a turkey as a promotional gimmick for the turkey industry. This Thanksgiving, each of us has the same power to pardon a turkey, but to do it as an act of kindness, compassion and giving thanks for life, health and happiness.
The 300 million turkeys slaughtered in the U.S. each year have nothing to give thanks for. They breathe toxic fumes in crowded sheds. Their beaks and toes are severed. At the slaughterhouse, workers cut their throats and dump them into boiling water.
The turkeys do get their revenge. Their flesh is laced with cholesterol and saturated fats that elevate the risk of heart disease, stroke and cancer. Careful adherence to government warning labels is required to avoid food poisoning. Any day now, they may bring us bird flu.
This Thanksgiving, I won't be reading the warning labels or calling the U.S. Department of Agriculture's meat and poultry hot line. I won't be staying awake at night wondering how that turkey lived and died. I will be joining millions of other Americans in observing this joyful family holiday with nonviolent, delicious products of the harvest: vegetables, fruits and grains.
My holiday meal may include a mock turkey made from soy, lentil or nut roast, stuffed squash, corn chowder or chestnut soup, candied yams, cranberry sauce, pumpkin or pecan pie and carrot cake. An Internet search on vegetarian Thanksgiving will provide more mail-order items and recipes than anyone would ever need.
Sherman Shebbington
Shermy, if you eat your boogers, you're a cannibal.</p>
Now, that's just mean. :-)
Screen name beef, eh? How insensitive!
How much animal habitat was destroyed to grow that delicious harvest?
Shermen, are you nekkid? For some reason all PETA members get nekkid when they try to make a point.
From the Modesto (CA) Bee 11/24/05: (We are not all liberal nuts out here)
Thanksgiving: A Christian holiday
Congress set Dec. 18, 1777, as a day of thanksgiving on which the American people "may express the grateful feelings of their hearts and consecrate themselves to the service of their divine benefactor" and on which they might "join the penitent confession of their manifold sins ... that it may please God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance."
Congress recommended that Americans petition God "to prosper the means of religion for the promotion and enlargement of that kingdom which consisteth in righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost."
I guess the Founding Fathers forgot they wanted separation of church and state when they passed this proclamation. This Thanksgiving I will give thanks to God for his divine intervention on behalf of this great Christian nation.
Have a happy Thanksgiving.
JEFF McCLINTICK
Modesto, CA
Man, what a bunch of confused deists those founding fathers were-- invoking Jesus' name and everything.......
One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting. In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas. Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States.
Burp! Please pass the gravy.....
If the indigenous people ever get their own holiday I'd suggest they hold off on the alcohol.
A guest at our home relayed a similar comment along the following lines, "We have turned history on its head and created a myth after having conquered the Native American . . . " To keep peace, I merely suggested that the history of man was one of conquest and that, in the spirit of the day, we should be thankful for all we have as a result.
Well they got SOMETHING right. For years, dark meat has been getting short-shrift.
Down with breasts and wings! Thighs and drumsticks uberalles!
Thanks for making me lose my lunch!
That was a wonderfully diplomatic answer.
BTW Was the guest a precocious child?
p.s. I just polished off my first plate of leftovers, including gravy rendered from the fat of a dead turkey which I dismembered yesterday, while sitting on my sunny Florida lanai as the Rush Limbaugh show played in the background.
Our family is small so instead of one large turkey, we kill 2 small chickens. LOL
And where are the "Free the Cranberries" kooks anyway?
"An Internet search on vegetarian Thanksgiving will provide more mail-order items and recipes than anyone would ever need."
Since I need zero such recipes, the letter writer is right!
I would love to see the time when a president says, "Pardon? No way! I am starving!"
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