Thankfulness

The Stoa has not forgotten Thanksgiving. I don't usually discuss holidays and such, unless there is a lesson to be learned from them, or a truth that requires deeper deliberation.

Thanksgiving is one of those holidays. First, I'm sure that everyone who reads my work knows how the holiday came to be. I'm also certain that you have thought about the Free-Market causes that permitted the first colonies to survive after their disastrous flirtation with colonial Socialism.

Secondly, this holiday means something, truly, to those really understand that it was a huge Thank You to God for showing them the way. The colonists offered up to Providence for God's bounty. I am currently living in the birthplace of that holiday. The ground I walk on every day is the same ground that Pocahontas and her tribe lived upon.

This holiday also marks the beginning of the end for the East Coast tribes of Indians. I doubt very much that there were enough Indian tribes left in the Tidewater region of Virginia to celebrate any holiday 80 years later.

Do I blame white Europeans for the genocide of the American Indian? Is there an argument against? Let's all be grown ups here. Yes, they did. Disease did much of it, but European expansionism finished it. If not Britain, then France. If not France, then Spain. The fate of the Indians was set once the first boat arrived off their shores.

It was a different mindset back then. Try to place yourself in their contemporary shoes. Europe as at constant war. Wars of Religion and Succession. The Plague was an ever-present threat to Europeans just as smallpox was to the Indians. There were the strong and the weak. The weak endured what they must at the hands of the strong. Life was, from the earliest, short, painful, and violent. Europeans had a dozen children and multiple marriages in the hopes that three or four children would survive into adulthood. The generations alive at that time shared similarities with our own, though shaded towards survival and expansion.

Those people looked upon North America as a paradise. The Indians were simply in their way. It was their escape from a Europe that was approaching the zenith of its cultural energy. The day would come where virtually no portion of the world would not have a European flag on it or near it. Had there been no North America these people would have vanished into the mists of time, ground under by the Establishment.

It happened. Get over it.

Today, I have much to be thankful for. I am healthy. I am employed. My family is healthy and I have friends. My brother, mother, and father are employed and living independently.

Driving in to work today, the weather was warm and sunny. Every morning I love looking out at the Navy Shipyards and feel pride in what they stand for. They protect all that I am thankful for. The Liberal idiots see only their narrow viewpoint of the world. They fail to understand just how vulnerable they are to the "old world". The world that is governed by the aggressive use of force. The world that never went away. That is the world held at bay by the men and women that use the equipment built in that shipyard.

People need to dwell on that for a while. Liberals, regardless of nation or culture, live in denial that such a world can touch them. They forget or never realize that it is others who permit them that denial.

My list of things to be thankful for looks and sounds rather short. It is, though not by design. Life has taught me, sometimes the hard way, what is important and what is not. A true Stoic would simply be thankful for another day to contemplate. I'm not that enlightened. My list is short as I have stripped myself of all that is unimportant to me. Those things that I will grieve over are those things I have listed. Nothing more, nothing less.

I regret little in my life, since regret only saps energy that I could be using to shape the future, to make my "now" better. I'm not perfect, though. I do find myself thinking upon failed relationships and what I have learned from them. An old girlfriend from high school and the friend that took her from me. A father that abandoned his family to hunger and possible eviction. The same father that tries to reforge those connections even as he lays the ground work for their dissolution due to his emotional dysfunction. A mother and brother who were far away even I lived only a few miles from them.

I don't regret those, for the reasons I stated above. I do take away lessons from that. I respect them for who they are and what they are to me. I can not foist my expectations upon them. I am ultimately responsible for my own attitudes. I cherish what I have and know that I will live more of my life away from my children then with. I cherish them and what they can be in the future.

Don't let that which is ultimately unimportant sap your energy. Don't let those things distract you from that which is important. You will have to determine what is dear to you. Be honest with yourself and true to your character.

Live well.

--Zavost