The Conservatives Story of Thanksgiving

The Pilgrims Fled Oppressive Health Care Coverage in England to Come to America

One of the great things about Thanksgiving is that it is a secular holiday, bereft of sectarian characteristics.  It celebrates the bounty of American life. 

But one can imagine that Conservatives do not like that, they want everything to be about politics and government and taxes.  So here is how this Forum imagines Conservatives would tell the story of the first Thanksgiving.

In England there lived a group of people who longed for the freedom to impose their will and their values on everyone else.  They felt that their religion required low taxes and a battle against any government support for people less fortunate than they were.  They argued that if people were poor or sick or illiterate or ill or unable to care for themselves without help this was their own fault and that to tax people who had the good fortune to inherit wealth to support those people was morally wrong.

These people wandered from country to country looking for sympathetic views and for a government that would impose their views on the rest of the population.  Lacking any support they sailed for America, where they could set up their own society and force any new residents to adhere to their views.  On the way over they wrote a Mayflower Compact which set out their political philosophy.  Some of the highlights were these.

            Only adult males could vote.

Any adult male trying to vote who was not a Pilgrim had to show three forms of photo ID.

Those who did manual labor would pay all the taxes.

Everyone was free to worship how they wanted to, as long as they worshiped in the church of the Pilgrims.

Harvard College would be founded and open to everyone except Jews, Blacks, Indians, Muslims, Women or foreigners.

After reaching the new world, the Pilgrims learned that while Indians inhabited much of where they wanted to live, the Indians did not have registered deeds to the property and so the Pilgrims were free to take whatever land they wanted.  The did allow the Indians to keep some property, but without the mineral rights.

After a year of near failure and near starvation, the Indians saved the Pilgrims by giving them food and support.  In return the Pilgrims hosted a great dinner of Thanksgiving, and allowed some of the Indiana to be servers, thinking that this career training as waiters would serve the population in the future where jobs like that would be the only career path for the indigenous people. 

In a final gesture to native American culture the Pilgrims advocated the nicknames of sporting teams to be derogatory terms for native Americans, believing that this more than anything else would allow the natives to assimilate into the right culture.