First Posting on this Thanksgiving

On this day of Thanksgiving, there's going to be a lot of eating, drinking and watching football but not a lot of contemplation about how this all began. This is the true story of Thanksgiving.

I will enter here in a VERY abridged version. You see, the Plymouth Rock settlers, (also known as the Mayflower 2 travelers) landed in the New World seeking a place to carry on their Puritan and religious beliefs. Not their fortune as is told in some school textbooks. But the settlers were unprepared for the rigors of a new life in this untamed and uncharted land. They quickly ran out of food and succumbed to illness and death in the first winter. Where their numbers were over a hundred, by winters end they were down to 46.

Luckily for them an English speaking Native American took pity on the settlers and brought them skins to wear and food to eat. But even HE knew that wouldn't sustain them for long. He offered to stay with the settlers through the following year to teach them how to live off the land. He showed them how to hunt, plant and fertilize crops, extract maple sap from trees, find medicinal plants in the woods and skin beaver to provide warm clothing for the winter months. Eek Gad! They hunted, skinned and ate animals? Yes, the Plymouth Rock settlers were not very politically correct - or vegetarians.

Here is where the story of Thanksgiving often diverts depending on the bias of the writer, historian or revisionist.

You see, AFTER the pilgrims were shown how to fend for themselves by the Indians, they settled into a sort of communal lifestyle reminiscent of the Hippie Communes of the 60's and 70's. But even the early settlers of America found that communal or Socialist living doesn't work. After a period of time where everyone was working and sharing the fruits of their labors with everyone else in the commune, they found that some didn't work as hard as the others. That some benefited from others hard work by not working hard at all. Sound familiar? Well you see without PERSONAL incentive some found it easier to just let others do the work and they would sit back and take the hand out from everyone else.

Well the crops diminished and soon they were on the verge of starving again as a few hard working people cannot support a community by itself if others are unwilling do for themselves. Sounding familiar yet? It wasn't until they gave each family their own plot of land where they were responsible for it and in order to survive they HAD to build a home, they HAD to plant crops to sustain themselves. Well, guess what happened? Faced with starvation and death from the elements, ALL the settlers began building homes, starting business and planting crops. Commerce began to arise and people sold and traded their goods. And lo and behold what happened? Come the following harvest they had so much bounty they decided to honor it with a glorious feast. Since the fruits of their labor were in part because of the help of the Indians, they invited them to the feast to help celebrate their good fortune. A feast that lasted 3 days.

The moral of the story?
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Socialism doesn't work. Without personal incentive and personal responsibility for oneself, people wither and die. So do societies. Just ask FORMER Communist Russia.

And that is the true story of Thanksgiving.