According to the New Haven Museum, George Washington dubbed Thursday, November 26, 1789 a day for “public thanksgiving and prayer” in the first U.S. capital, New York City. Abraham Lincoln re-affirmed Thanksgiving as an official federal holiday in 1863—not even a year after greenlighting the nation’s largest ever mass execution—the hanging of 38 Sioux in December 1862.

…As the colonists moved, they assigned much of the land they took to the states. Land-grant colleges slathered animal agribusiness over the Great Plains. To this day, we bury the land under feed crops, feedlots, herbicides and pesticides because we fail to respect the interests of river otters, whooping cranes, burrowing owls, long-billed curlews, black-footed ferrets, wolves, coyotes and kit foxes. U.S. territory leads the world in extinctions of nonhuman life.

We need to protect and restore what’s salvageable. We need to appreciate the role of every living community on this one and only Earth. To say “no” to the weapons and the wars; to take down the walls. To understand that genocide and ecocide must never be excused, let alone celebrated.

But What Shall We Have for Dinner? ➡️ Recipe included in the full piece, just published at CounterPunch.