It's Not About The Stuffing?

So Jeff, who is a serious history geek, was explaining to me yesterday that the Pilgrims and Indians sitting down for dinner together on the first Thanksgiving was really all about the fact that the one Indian tribe was about to be overrun by another tribe and the first tribe pretended to want to be friends with the Pilgrims because the Pilgrims had guns.

I promised not to be cynical about Thanksgiving yesterday, but seriously, how can we celebrate something like that? With pie and stuffing?

Still, it made me think about interdependence and how much I like it.

I have a friend at school who is from Indonesia and isn't very good at English, but a whiz with math, so we've built what I hope will be a lifelong friendship based on him getting me through graduate-level microeconomics class, and me telling him when his grammar is wrong. And we just learned that last year after the ice storm in the Berkshires, when we bailed and went to the Cape to wait a week for the power to come on, a neighbor with a front-loader (which is some kind of big construction vehicle) moved a great big tree from the middle of our driveway for us. And if the cats catch mice in our cellar, I have Jeff who will remove the mouse remains for me, since I can't bring myself to deal with it. In return, I show him love and gratitude.

So I think the Indians might have just gone ahead and told the Pilgrims that they needed to borrow a cup of gunpowder, and maybe the Pilgrims didn't need to steal the Indian's corn - and I'm really sorry about the smallpox in the blankets. Let's just acknowledge that we need one another and do our best to be trustworthy about it, o.k.? That's something worth giving thanks for.