Thanksgiving provides a time for Americans to stop going to their jobs, gather with the remnants of their divorce-shattered families, and pig out on foods whose origins they do not understand while guzzling box wine. Naturally, this holiday without a comprehensible purpose stresses people and so they talk politics.
As the old joke goes, you can save a lot of money on Christmas presents by telling people what you really think about politics on Thanksgiving. Your family will shun you and your friends will hide lest you taint them with your stink of dangerous rejection of the dominant paradigm.
Before you consider exactly how much you want to engage in whatever political drama plays out over the holiday, it makes sense to contemplate the roots of American angst over the holiday season. You may have observed that during holidays, there are two types of people: those who are reasonably happy and those who are utterly, darkly, self-obsessively miserable.
You can see it in how people behave. The individuals who crowd the aisles in stores, block the sidewalks downtown, drive aggressively and distractedly, and punish us with their slow walks and complete obliviousness to the needs of everyone around them show how profound the misery is. You do not notice the happy people; they are just doing their thing, efficiently and quietly.
The pervasive misery originates in the lack of purpose to these holidays. Christmas would be a great Christian holiday, except that thanks to diversity and people fleeing Christianity because of the Leftist takeover of the churches, we are not a Christian nation. Thanksgiving would be a great second July Fourth except that no one believes in the nation with no heritage, no shared values system, and no sense of agreement that its founding was even a good idea. The Left ruined that, too.
As a result, no one knows what they should desire on these holidays. There is the media myth, which shows us happy people surrounded by family enjoying food and wine, and then the reality, which is that real-world families are rarely so simple and that things get neurotic and alien rather fast. Even more, no one really feels confident in this dying society and looking toward its future, which is why they rant about politics as if trying to convince themselves that it has a future after all.
We feel like these should be significant days, marking our time in some form that is meaningful. We hope that they somehow tie together the experience of the year and show us what we were struggling to achieve. Instead, they show us failures: wrecked families, alienated people, and many illusions bleated as truth because the speakers are terrified that these illusions are in fact not true.
Just as there are two types of people out there, you will find two types of thought at the dinner table. No matter how complex or how remote to the topic, every opinion will either be in support of our current direction or against it. Even those who claim to be opposing the dominant vein of thought may be affirming the system that keeps their viewpoint as a minority and will never admit it to a win, and those who affirm it have resigned themselves to failure.
Consider Uncle Dave. He votes Republican every election, and will tell you volubly how minorities are natural conservatives, how the rule of law and the Constitution is important, and how people become conservative as they get older. He thinks that somehow America will swing Right despite minorities never voting in a majority for conservatives, and he believes that if everyone just finds Jesus, works hard (harder!) at their jobs, and supports the military, somehow everything will be all right.
Countering that you have Cousin Sara. A single woman for the past twenty years of adulthood, she works as an editor at a large publishing house. In her view, the good days are just beginning: we have finally defeated the racist white male patriarchy, and now a rainbow group of minorities, women, homosexuals, transgenders, and Wiccans will steer our country on a moral path.
If you tried to speak sense to these two, however, you would find out that they have more in common than not. They both support the System as it is and believe that it is headed in a good direction, instead of recognizing that it is busily destroying all of us from the inside out by sabotaging our sense of future. We know in our gut that we are doomed, but we have no vocabulary to use for this or events to point toward, so we shrug, suck it up, and keep supporting the means of our own destruction.
Were you to mention that we are Rome 2.0 and falling fast, Dave and Sara would unite and turn on you. To Dave, you are a dangerous liberal who opposes the Constitution and might be a racist, despite there being exactly zero minority-majority areas which vote Republican. To Sara, you deny the individuality of people and their right to have society support them, especially with your dangerous insistence that civilization be functional instead of a sort of business that we pay to allow us to splash our drama over it like a canvas.
Yes, Republicans and Democrats have their differences over the table, but at the end of the day, there are only two types: regime supporters, and those who do not need the regime, its mob of angry proles, or its theories. We belong to the latter group, those of us who see that our civilization is collapsing, and this makes us feared.
While the other two are busy pretending that their political drama makes them marginalized, the fact is that we cannot even speak our viewpoint without people panicking, becoming offended, and retaliating against us. We are the silenced and censored. We are the people whose viewpoint is most relevant and therefore most frequently pre-emptively denied. We upend the entire discussion.
For that reason, it makes sense to stop viewing political conversation on Thanksgiving as a yes/no question. The middle path or third way awaits: instead of arguing for anything, make fun of what people are talking about. Laugh at Dave and his bourgeois idiocy just as you find Sara and her idealistic daydreaming to be comical. Make fun of the idea that everything will be OK, and treat it like you would any nonsense that is irrelevant, namely with derision and playfulness.
Feel free to avoid suggesting anything. You can just point out that we have reached the stage in our civilization where truth would not only be dangerous, but unwanted. “How will that make anyone happy?” you can ask, and then resume discussing the politics of others as if they were movies or magazines, pleasant distractions designed to make people feel better while changing nothing about the world.
As the saying goes, the medium is the message, and your attitude toward politics can convey more than any political statement you could make. At this point, having political opinions is a joke; it is students reciting answers to a teacher, or a snake oil salesman bleating at the crowd what he knows they already believe. The West has been swallowed up by its own public relations and advertising.
On the other hand, many of us are already flying free. We realize that almost everything around us is based on illusion which means that it is headed for collapse and nothing we can do will change that. Our civilization doomed itself by choosing lies instead of accuracy, and so we have to watch it go downhill without any ability to change that.
(As an aside, my response to any political commentary today is, “Well, it’s a bit late in the fall of Rome 2.0 to worry about something like politics, isn’t it?” This lets me sail on to something more fun and leaves them wondering if I’m right.)
This means that we no longer have to care about the elaborate fictions that people tell themselves in order to feel good about their holiday. We have accepted the worse, and now we are free, our minds no longer dedicated at all to justifying, rationalizing, and affirming our decay as some kind of victory. We know that all is lost, and we are planning for what comes afterwards, which is what the rest of them fear more than any political opinion.
Tags: collapse, family, politics, thanksgiving