Thanksgiving is a bad holiday. Christmas isn’t much better. In my opinion, most of our holidays do us a disservice; Veterans Day, Memorial Day, the 4th of July, Easter—even Valentine’s Day.
I would even extend that statement to include weekly church attendance.
Why? You might ask.
I’ll get back to that. I first want to approach my premise from another direction.
Man’s inhumanity to man is not only legendary, it is now epidemic in our American society. America suffers from the greatest amount of home-grown violence, one American on another, way more than any other 1st-world country in the world.
It would be easy to blame popular targets—
Video games which increase ADHD behaviors in both children and adults;
The decreased use of paper and pencil in schools in favor of Electronic educational tools which are absolutely proven to lower retention and test scores in students;
Violence in the movies, television shows and TV news segments. While angering us, they also desensitize us to bloodshed;
The polarization of ethnic groups; the melting pot is empty and tribalism has taken its place.
On the one hand, we have watershed holiday observations which should and DO cause us to be thankful, tolerant, and circumspect. On the other hand we have hate, intolerance, and violence which promote anger, uncertainty and fear.
One gives us an excuse, the other, motivation.
Which brings me back to why I believe holidays do us a disservice. That will be my focus as I continue this blog tomorrow. See you then.
