Today is Thanksgiving Day.
I won't be giving thanks in the traditional sense. After all, this holiday is a Pilgrim celebration of surviving a harsh winter in Massachusetts (and according to a few accounts, the massacre of 700 Native American neighbors), and since I have left the Christian faith and see it in contempt now, I want to have nothing to do with it. The whole Pilgrim/Puritan story has been corrupted into an argument for a Christian theocracy in the United States, and that's something I will never stand for.
Renovation of my living quarters means that I certainly won't be cooking/eating a turkey this year.
I can, however, still be grateful for getting to know the folks at Democracy Cell Project in the past year, who have kept my sanity alive, and have proven to be a wonderful group of people when I attended the pro-peace activities in Washington, DC in September. I can also be grateful for a window of business opportunities that sent me to South Korea last week; although it's still a crapshoot at this stage, I do hope it can move me forward in the future - and hopefully have me rewriting history both there and here. And I should never forget the great opportunity and circle of people that my writing life has led to, from my memoir to the all-important novel.
I hope the holiday season, which really takes off tomorrow, will not get the better of me.
