Call Me Stormy

Food, Football and Oppression

Should Americans celebrate Thanksgiving as a day of gratitude? Or should they mourn it as a day of guilt? In 2007, Seattle school officials made national news by describing the holiday as a time of mourning, a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal. This new narrative described the Pilgrims as arrogant oppressors who fled persecution only to become oppressors themselves.

“But this is wrong on every count,” says Michael Medved, author of the The American Miracle. “First of all, the Pilgrims didn’t flee across the ocean to avoid persecution, or even England. They’d been living for over a decade in Holland and feared seduction, not persecution, worrying that their children would be corrupted by the materialistic Dutch culture.” Thus they were running to the New World not from oppression, but toward  holiness. Here’s the rest of the story and the truth about the first Thanksgiving on PragerU.