Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. It is the one day where we celebrate putting aside our differences and doing the most basic thing humans can do together, share a meal.
It is also the one holiday that does nothing to aggrandize The State in all its rotten guises. For that alone it would be my personal favorite. Ultimately this is just a story about two very different people coming together to share the fruits of the harvest and the hunt to begin the long and difficult process of building trust.
Trust, by the way, is the basis for civilization itself. Without trust there is nothing, just The Hunger Games.
It doesn’t matter whether the stories of the first Thanksgiving are true or not. Only those with an obsession with demystifying the world to salve their own inner emptiness care about such historical ‘truths.’
It is the story itself that has power, like all great stories.
It’s a story that is deeply embedded in the Myth of America as the great experiment in governance and rebellion against the colonial powers of Europe.
In the end, that Myth is just that, of course, a myth.
America’s history is much more nuanced and complex, darker and lighter than the foundations of that Myth care to admit. I’m not here to white, brown or even greenwash America’s history any more than an honest British, Italian, Russian, or Chinese person would do to their own.
I’m here to discuss why it is we should be thankful for even having a world where such Myths can even exist.
Of course history is messy. It’s violent and, at times, horrific. Yes, some people suck. Wars happened and will happen. Genocides committed and are yet to be committed.
The big stories we all thrill to on our screens today big and small try to help us navigate what happens when people go mad in groups, lose their sense of propriety and humility, and become obsessed with their own fears at the expense of their empathy.
This is what a breakdown of trust leads to, a loss of civilization.
We live in a time where those in power show their bottomless disdain for humanity by only focusing on those bad parts of it. It’s now grown to even dissing this one American tradition that is one of the last honest lessons for a world spiraling out of control.
Because that is what Thanksgiving is all about. Taking a time out from the harsh reality of existence and being thankful for what you have, not envious of or wistful for what you don’t.
To listen to the race-baiting, soulless apparatchiks screeching about how we should turn Thanksgiving into yet another opportunity to distrust each other before eating a meal devoid of nutrition, i.e. the turkey, desperately imploring us to keep up barriers between family members over COVID is revealing more of their sickness than anyone else’s.
These are people without hope or faith in anything. They are fallen, power-hungry zombies consumed with self-importance painting on a face of empathy while extolling medical apartheid and scapegoating the unvaxxed to fuel their hatred.
These are humanity’s enemies, not a virus with a 0.1% mortality rate or those brave enough to face it without the help of Big Brother.
And yet, we should even be thankful for them.
Because without them as a counter-example, we have no way to gauge our own behavior. We have no mirror to look into and see our own tendencies towards ugliness. Because without that ability to see first hand what it is we do not want to be, we become as lost in our own fugue of self-importance which justifies any amount of violence as they are.
I don’t hate the Joy Ann Reids and the Jenn Psakis of this world. I celebrate their depravity because without them there can be no opportunity to point out just how insane the world they advocate is.
Peaking Duck
Last week I speculated that we had reached Peak Davos. I’m surprised to report that I got a lot less push back from that article than I was expecting.
Right on cue, the morning after our annual celebration of common decency and reconnection with our deracinated families, we are bombarded with a new variant of COVID to bludgeon us with.
On the thinnest trading day of the year in the U.S., when most of us are nursing epic carb hangovers while doomscrolling through our Twitter feeds and trolling Amazon for the best deals on a bunch of shit we know in our hearts we don’t need, they trot out the fear porn nuclear barrage.
The Dow? Down 1119.00 points.
Oil? Down $9.31 per barrel.
Bitcoin? Down $5200, nearly 10%
If you thought you could escape Davos‘ Great Reset, think again. Everything you have will be theirs. Everything you desire — family, home, stability, hope — is subject to their approval. Pay no attention to the timing, the virology, or the logic. Just ab-react in real time to a wholly manufactured farce which if you watched it as a movie after Thanksgiving dinner, you’d shut off for being too contrived.
Honestly, at this point they really should hire some better writers because this movie sucks worse than Captain Marvel did.
The ‘Nu’ variant, or NuVID for short, is evolving so fast even its name had to be quickly changed to Omicron to keep us confused. Is it the Nu variant? or Omicron? People will now spend hours of their lives being corrected about what the name of this thing is so midwits can make themselves feel more informed than their mouth-breathing, unvaxxed brethren they still hate.
We don’t know anything about NuVID than it has evolved multiple new spike proteins and whatever else the gods of virology deign to tell us about it.
Even though we know next to nothing of either the virulence or transmissibility of NuVID, the first response from the usual suspects is to ramp up talk of further locking down populations all over Europe. The world was beginning to get back to some semblance of normal but now everyone is flapping their wings in panic like my ducks do when the dogs hear a noise in the woods and start barking.
We’d faced down our worst fears and were beginning to work through the supply chain issues, the backlogs of paperwork, and had adjusted to new workflows and schedules. Those that stood in opposition to the vaccine mandates wouldn’t be budged from their positions anymore and their protests not televised.
Vaccine distribution centers were shutting down, people were assuming the risk of living, finding sources of ivermectin and HCQ to treat themselves while the Medical Industrial Complex kept trying to get in their way.
And so our reward for being thankful for mostly feeling like we’d gotten through this terrible ordeal — the hysteria over the virus, not the virus itself — was to be threatened again with more of the same.
And, again, I am thankful for this. Because this latest round of fear porn is the most obvious, the most over-the-top, the crudest attempt at psychological warfare Davos has engaged in yet.
That makes it easy to look at and laugh.
But this doesn’t matter to those in charge. If we laugh at them and their seriousness become even more incensed.
They could see their bonds slipping and people getting back to normal. They could see the same massive protests around the world outside their seats of power that I’ve seen and knew it was time to play their next, even more desperate card.
The only thing that I’m even remotely afraid of at this point are the people who still need to believe in all of this.
And yet, we should still be thankful for the confirmation of our knowing they have been lying to us about all of this the entire time.
This will be my last attempt to try to get through to the fearful again. Cases aren’t hospitalizations. And hospitalizations aren’t a death sentence. With the mountain of evidence out there that none of the numbers we’ve been given about COVID were ever accurate why do you think we should believe anything about NuVID?
Trust Should be a Four-Letter Word
It gets back to that basic building block of civilization itself. Trust.
Without it the Pilgrims and the Native Americans couldn’t have sat down around the table together. Without it the Pilgrims wouldn’t have even been able to cross the Atlantic in the first place, or hired the boat that brought them there. Without trust that boat would still have been a glint in the eye of the person dreaming of building it, since it was a project far grander than his meager allotment of time on this planet would have been able to complete.
Davos says it is motivated by a desire to save humanity from itself. It has deemed our civilization unworthy of them and their grand ideas and like angry gods are in the process of wiping it clean from the earth to Build it Back Better, in their image, not ours.
But that idea cannot become real unless we lend it credence, unless we, like them become consumed with the things we’ve lost and will never have rather than embrace that which is in front of us. Civilization isn’t some esoteric thing that can be conjured up by speaking magic words from a mass communications device.
Civilization comes from looking another person in the eye, shaking their hand and making an agreement which both sides honor to the best of their ability.
For a critical mass of people in the West, their trust in the institutions that governed them is gone. It is never coming back.
And without that trust there can be no going back to the old system where Davos moved pieces on the board and we reacted to them within the rules of the game because we thought the rules reinforced civilization.
But we know now that too, is a lie. And for that I am eternally thankful to Davos. Because without their Quixotic and, unfortunately, deadly quest to remake humanity so many people would have never woken up to the reality of their existence.
That’s the reason why I’m more convinced today than before that we’ve reached Peak Davos because today I’m thankful for knowing the community of people ready to take that next first step across the divide and form new bonds of trust which will power the next myths capable of sustaining a better civilization.
Reprinted with permission from Gold Goats ‘n Guns.
