Much like Columbus Day, Thanksgiving Day has the taint of Western Imperialism on it. It’s just the sad fact of history, and I do try my best not to make too much of it. Just like black people can reclaim the word “nigger,” and gay and lesbian people can reclaim the word “queer,” perhaps we people of color can simply re-appropriate Thanksgiving Day and recreate it so that it doesn’t underscore nor elide the destruction of indigenous culture, and perhaps still be a meaningful day of thanksgiving.

While November 7th has been interpreted by most sane pundits as a referendum on the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party, I think realistically, the future of the American Republic still hangs in the balance, and on a day like this that evokes early American history, I can’t help but wax pendantically.

I learned early on in high school that the Puritans were a rather twisted cultish sect who had some weird beliefs, some of which are just plain evil. Given that I was born and raised Roman Catholic, I found it appalling that they thought that God is vengeful and merciless. I can’t really stomach the convictions of Calvinism, especially the tenet that humanity is inherently depraved. It runs counter to my own catechism and definitely offends my current beliefs.

It was my American literature class in sophomore year that really focused on this aspect of American history. We almost mindless invoke the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock, never really looking deep into what that particular colony stood for, and when you look at it from the standpoint of what I think is mainstream Christianity, it’s kind of really sick.

And from this lens, a lot of the twisted hypocrisy of the religious fundamentalists in the U.S. actually makes a kind of warped sense. Like it or not, our society is deeply infiltrated with the five tenets of Calvinism, and a lot of the atrocities the state has committed in our name are actively influenced by these perverse beliefs.

I know it sounds disgustingly judgemental, but that’s where my study of the Puritans led me. Religious tolerance is all well and good, but when it starts impinging on personal liberty, I think it should be actively opposed and even destroyed. (I mean, if I were talking about fundamentalist Islam instead of fundamentalist Christiantiy, I bet you I’d have a lot more supporters. And yet if you look at them, fundies have a lot more in common with each other than with their mainstream brethren. Despite being born and raised a Christian, a lot of their beliefs are completely alien and somewhat sickening to me.)

So these are some of the things I’m thankful for, I guess. That despite the adversities that have faced people of color and of indigenous people around the world, they have still survived the onslaught of Western Civ, and that the Founding Fathers, whatever their prejudices, had a brilliant idea when they specified freedom of religion and separation of Church and State.