The Last Thanksgiving

And the first day of planetary gratitude

Mike Meyer
5 min readNov 22, 2023

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Photo by Laela Sequoia on Unsplash

It feels strange being thankful for a world that we are destroying. Thanksgiving is a traditional harvest festival with the common theme of sharing food that has been harvested. That is tied to respect for the land and its wealth we have reaped over the previous year.

The land and planet we all share is our commonwealth, yet that ancient concept has been lost over the centuries in America. The harvest feast is shared, but the land, our biome, and the planet are taken for granted.

In America, we are to be thankful for our family and friends, but little goes beyond personal success and well-being. Our thanks are very economical and selfish.

But this, along with almost everything else that we do, must change. The need for that is shown by the growing tendency to fear Thanksgiving, which often devolves into political arguments,

In a culture struggling with the failure of its empire and the resulting political collapse, facing a future of environmental disaster, economic anxiety, and hardship, all based on the worship of greed, someone must be blamed. That does not produce generosity and love.

This certainly wasn’t always the case. The stereotypical political confrontations between young and old weren’t always the…

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Mike Meyer
Mike Meyer

Written by Mike Meyer

Writer, Educator, Campus CIO (retired) . Essays on our changing reality here, news and more at https://rlandok.substack.com/