By Steve Sailer
11/23/2017
A New York Times Editorial retconning America’s past that reads like a Steve Sailer parody of a New York Times editorial retconning America’s past:
What America Celebrates on Thanksgiving By THE EDITORIAL BOARD NOV. 22, 2017 In these days of anxiety and alienation, Thanksgiving offers the warm embrace of inclusiveness. Particularly for many people with families and faiths rooted in other lands, no other holiday, not even the Fourth of July, has so great a capacity to make them feel American. A child of Orthodox Jewish immigrants could feel his apartness on other festivals celebrated by the larger society. Christmas, Easter, Halloween — all are distinctly Christian observances, no matter how temporal and commercialized they have become. They are inevitable reminders for some Americans that they are different. Thanksgiving’s origins are also Christian. But it has evolved into something both secular and spiritual, a day devoted to family and amity. … Thanksgiving is at heart more than parades, or football or even country; there’s no flag-waving or chest-thumping. It is about shared bounty and shared humanity. That’s why the writer Saadia Faruqi, a Pakistan-born Muslim, welcomes the day. “For a Pakistani-American, Thanksgiving is as wholesome and normal a holiday as one can get,” she said in a 2015 essay…. No turkey, either, for Saumya Arya Haas, a writer who is Hindu. … Writing last month on the website of the International Buddhist Society, David Westdorp said he had adopted Buddhist ways of living in recent years. … Lincoln may well have anticipated all those convictions — Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish and Christian — when in 1863 he proclaimed the last Thursday in November to be “a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” … Lincoln knew his Bible, and was surely familiar with a passage from Exodus all too often ignored in our present era of hard feelings: “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” …
This kind of retconning of America’s past to make it non-triggering to the touchy new elites of the Current Year is so pervasive that it’s almost unnoticed.
I don’t see the word “Pilgrim” mentioned in this editorial about a national holiday commemorating the English settlement of the American wilderness. Instead, it’s about immigrants, not settlers, as being the most important peoples in American history (with one particular Ellis Island immigrant group’s sensitivities and resentments of course being given pride of place), even if, technically, they got here a long time later.
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