Giving Thanks For Refuting Nonsense

 AMONG TEH MANY blessings for which we ought to give thanks, none is more important not only than our freedom to seek truth, but our intellectual ability to distinguish between truth and nonsense, and to repudiate the latter with our intellectual faculties. In our age of disinformation, in which everyone is entitled, so everyone seems to think, to his or her own set of facts, this ability has never been of greater importance. The forces arrayed in the name of false realities are formidable, including the right wing media, social media, right wing politicians, right wing citizens, and the right wing. Right wing religion tells us that if we do not embrace their religion we will suffer eternal damnation, an obvious lie. Right wing politicians tell us that when donald Trump was elected, America, which had once been great, no longer was, but that he could make it so again, and that, during his four years in office, he did exactly that. another obvious lie. Our modern false narratives are potent, implacable, and will be difficult to dispel. We must however, find a way to do it. We know we can, because in recent years we have begun to correct historical lie, lie such as Christopher Columbus was a good person and a great contributor to western civilization, or that the first thanksgiving holiday was a glorious cooperative culinary celebration involving both Europeans and native Americans. after a long and arduous process of reeducation by intreped  historians intent on dismantling American hagiography, hagiography being history written in such a way as to make its subjects look dishonestly good, we now understand that Columbus was a psychotic butcher whose lust for fame and wealth caused the genocidal murder of millions of people, and that the thanksgiving myth of 1621 is exactly that, a myth. Actually, the folks who dropped anchor in Massachusetts in 1620 were ill prepared to feed themselves, and they resorted to stealing form the local natives, by digging up their stored food supplies  under cover of darkness, by moonlight. The natives were afraid of the Europeans, because the newcomers had a magical way of putting a hole in and dropping a deer at long range with no discernible causal connection other than a loud noise. But they were outraged enough to strike back with arrows, and when the pilgrims asked why the natives hated the Puritans so much, as if they didn't know, the natives sinply said "because you're a bunch of thieves." All you had to do is ask, they scolded. Sign language, like morality, has a certain universal aspect to it.We don't teach that in schools, or we didn't until perhaps recently, simply because it makes the first "Americans" look bad. Hence, hagiography. But, we are becoming more forthright. Columbus Day is now largely ignored, and Thanksgiving Day is slowly being replace by a more modern cultural celebration of diversity sort of thing, all probably for the best.next thin you know, we'll come to terms with the fact that dropping two nukes on Japan was nothing other than two war crimes, that  Ronald Reagan was straight up cold killer, that most American presidents were war criminals in one way or another, but, that is for another day. We still have much work to do. For now, suffice to say that Biden won the election without stealing it, and have a happy Thanksgiving.