Posted on 11/24/2005 9:09:10 AM PST by BellStar
What Thanksgiving should be
How wonderful it is, how pleasant when brothers live together in harmony!
Psalm 133:1 NLT
Fighting historical vandalism
In an article in Focus on the Family's Citizen magazine, Douglas Phillips describes how he took his family to Plymouth, Massachusetts, a few years ago and was shocked at what he found. Atop Cole's Hill, the burial ground for Pilgrims who died that first hard winter, Phillips was startled to see a city truck pull up and men pile out carrying shovels. They told Phillips the city was placing a new monument.
"Most revolutions are staged at night," Phillips wrote, so he wasn't surprised the next day to find stone markers all over Plymouth designating Thanksgiving as a day of mourning—a day to recall how the Pilgrims murdered and stole from their Indian neighbors. That afternoon, demonstrators—mostly white college kids—celebrated their victory by defacing the traditional monuments. Plymouth had transformed a tale of religious freedom into a story of genocide.
The historical reality is totally different. While it's true that later settlers abused the Native Americans, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians lived together in peace for fifty years. They signed covenants, bought and sold property, and fought against mutual enemies.
The modern obsession with group identity and victimhood encourages us to see those assigned to other groups as our enemies. When we interact with them, we ought to recall the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Indians and model not hostility and hatred but brotherly love. As the psalmist notes, a willingness to get along with others makes for a pleasant and peaceful life.
adapted from How Now Shall We Live? Devotional by Charles Colson (Tyndale) pp 631-32
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