Reading harold_maude's journal

November 24, 2005

The day they got Big Bird and sacrificed it, and what that all means.

Wild turkeys I'm told are very hard to track and bag. They are smarter than domesticated turkeys. Domesticated turkeys will lift their head in the rain and drown, same as sheep.
Somewhere along the line, some bright entrapenure got the idea that raising turkeys was a good thing.

So, as with everything else that people put into boxes and force to multiply, they ended giving them hormones and made birds so fat so fast that standing up is a challange.
They do the same to chickens.

But the birds are enormous. And I suppose that was the idea to begin with. To have an abundance of birds that are connected and somehow symbolize a day dedicated to survival.

Think about it, the very first thanksgiving was a celebration of survival. These people who had traveled across a really big ocean, and spent a year trying to make a new home in a land that was strange and filled with alot of things that could be potentially lethal.

There were these other people already in this new land who were familiar with the landscape and the animals and all the
other things that make living in a place possible.
These guys we know as native americans.
Anyway, they watched the newbies trying to do their thing. I'm sure they felt sorry for them. Because they came out
of the woods and said something that could be translated this way:

"Hey there, welcome to here. We noticed your having a little trouble and survival can sometimes be a bitch especially
when you don't know what kind of soil your dealing with and what kind of animals around here are dangerous and which
ones are good to eat.
So we got together and had a meeting and decited to lend a hand."

So, the native americans helped the newbies by teaching them how to raise corn. A very important staple in the new place.
And they helped them do other things too.

I think it would have been really weird for everyone when it came to checking each other's clothes out.
You have one group of people dressed in animal skins while the other group is dressed in knickers, and long layered dresses.
Oh yeah, can't forget the hat thing.
For some reason, the european thing has always involved a hat.
Now a hat is a functional object. It can keep the rain off your head, and the sun outta your eyes.
But mostly it seems that people will wear hats as a statement of fashion.

Anyway, so here you have these people who know the ropes teaching the newbies about life in the new land, and what
a harvest means and after all that is said and done, the newbies got together and decited that having a celebration
with their new friends and mentors would be a really kick ass thing to do.

So, immagine this, you have some long makeshift tables, outside in the weather, because they are too big to fit into one
of the crudely built cabins. Tools were not as abundant as today, and it's a given there were no skill saws or electric
nailguns or anything like that hanging about.

So the dwelling places these people built, although extreemly welbuilt and functional were definately not most people's
idea of luxery houseing.
But they kept the weather outside and allowed a person to sleep under a roof, as well as keeping any unwanted preditor outside instead of inside where the pickins for chow were easy. Kind of like shooting fish in a barrel.

So you have these long tables and the food is there and for what ever reason, I'm not sure what the consense was on this, but the turkey, or turkeys was the bird chosen for dinner that afternoon, for the main meat course.

It's a given that they were not eating at night, as it would have been way to cold and the lighting would have been a pain
to see by, as well as the smell of food would have drawn the native carnivors to supper as well.
That's not what they wanted.
So it was an afternoon supper.

I can hear the converstaions now: "We made it. A year of living here and yes, we lost a few people in our group, and we're sad they couldn't be here with us today, but they are with us in spirit and that's all that matters.
We made it because we have these new friends who helped us, by teaching us how to grow food and trap animals
to eat, and we just wanted to let you guys know that we are really greatful for all your help."

(future generations will forget, and they will see you as the enemy, in the way of taking over this awesome place, so they will hunt and kill you, put your children on things called reservations and make you live acording to their rules, and basicly take everything away from you that makes you who you are in favor of their own distructive culture.
And if you knew that now you would have killed everyone of us where we sit.
It's a good thing for us that you don't have forsight. We are really greatful for that)

After dinner, everyone with a full belly and great converstation spent that afternoon feeling many things.
Gratitude with the newbies, and I'm not sure what the native americans were feeling, maybe happiness that
a group of struggling people made it a whole year.
Thinking maybe these people would bring touches of their culture to the land and it would be ok.
They didn't see what was about to hit them, a few years down the road.

So there you have it, the day is here that we all gather around a table filled with modern food, eating like
pigs and watching t.v. and when we can't move anymore, we think about pumpkin pie, another tradition
that got attached to this day somehow, and not really remembering what this day really is about.

We talk about what we are greatful for.
We talk about so many things, the start of the christmas buying madness that starts the day after this,
and when that day comes round, I'll have a few choice notes about it as well.
In all the things that are said and done, we somehow forget why we are doing what we do on this day.

We forget because we are not in survial mode anymore.
Not in the way that they were. There are people who are in survial mode now, but what they have
to fear most is other people.

We have become the peditors as well as the victims.
We have shown ourselves to be the animals we really are. The animals in the wild are more at risk from
us than we will ever be from them.
We are busy distroying their homelands. We are busy conquoring and taking at will. Distroying the balance,
putting what is left of the natural world into parks, nature zoos.

I'm very sure if thoes first native people saw what this place is now they would have killed everyone of thoes people
on site.
It would have broken their heart to see the children of future generations being treated like cattle and
how, like the buffalo, almost completely distroyed.
That's not a human thing to do, it's a mindless greedy animal thing to do.
I appoligize to all the four beasts for using the word animal that way.

Animals in the wild stay with in the balance of nature. They take only what they need, never more.
Their survival depends on it.

We have no clue what it means anymore to be in that mode.
I wonder if the people who came across the ocean ever did have a clue what that ment. To take only what
you need and work to protect what remains so that you can continue to eat.

We have poisoned the water. Poisoned the land and desimated the forests. All in the name of modern living.
And it really, really sucks.

I think about all the bullshit that goes on daily. We are now emersed and consumed by the information age.
Newspapers are printed out on trees, I don't know how many of the newspapers are printed on recycled paper,
or if they just take new trees to make the stuff out of.

But most of what is printed on those newspapers is crap. Really bad entertainment designed to compliment the
crap being vomited out of a black box that so many people are so addicted to that they don't even know
they are addicted anymore.

I don't have to watch the news to see the effect of all of this. I just have to go out into it to see it.
People driving like mental patients who have escaped and driving around with cell phones attached by one hand
to the side of their head.

Exibiting impaitents as they rush about. Going to jobs that are stealing their lives, getting a paycheck that barely
covers anything, and eating processed, synthisized food that is irrated, pumped full of synthetic vitamins
and eating birds so full of crap, grown way too fast to be anything but a toxic explosion waiting to happen,
yes, the birds are grown so fast that sometimes they explode inside and die right there in the pens.

They are butchered and washed with more chemicals and packaged and sent out to grocery stores everywhere
and on this day they end up on the tables of americans everywhere.

No where in all of this, except in the remnants of what it's suppose to be helping us to remember, the remnants being
in the thanksgiving programs given in gradeschools, is there any shred of anything that first thanksgiving really
ment or was.
And it's sad.

No one really has any idea of what that first dinner felt like. How awesome it must have tasted. It was a huge celebration saying "we made it this far, we're still alive."
I immagine everything they ate that day was like eating the best dinner ever. Everything probably tasted magnificant.
And I know their hearts were in the right place on that day.
There were no distractions to take any space in that place. Only greatful hearts.

Family. Happiness of the people who's children had not died durring that first year, but were still there sitting now
beside them, celebrating the fact they were still alive.
That's what I believe the first thanksgiving was, and I'm very sure it's not what this day means to most americans
in this modern world.

We have lost much. This day would be more approately spent grieving at what has been lost and what we are facing.
The world is changing. Global warming is fact now. We are loosing species of plants and animals and we are now
in a race to survive the results of our stupidity.

I don't know what the children of the future will think of us, or the people who started all of this mess.
But I do know this, that if we don't stop what we are doing, we are going to sign the death sentance of the planet
and our own speices.
And everyone out there in the universe who is watching will shake their heads and wisper "and they had so much
potential. What a waste of life"

It only looks that way because your standing on your head.

This post was edited by harold_maude on Nov 24, 2005.