Thanksgiving Message 2004

By James Donahue

Millions of Americans today are gathering with their families to stuff themselves on rich food before retiring to a couch potato status and letting television poison their brains.

They joke about what they are doing, knowing at least subconsciously that it is misguided. Since it has become an American tradition they are using herd mentality and doing it anyway.

It is the beginning of a month-long holiday "season" filled with gluttony, spangles and pure ugliness all committed in the name of Jesus.

This is the way the Americans celebrate their Thanksgiving Holiday. It is a day of turkey destruction. A day of over indulgence with rich food. A day of family feuding. A day of televised football. Of belching, farting and feeling bloated. At least that is how it is for those who still have jobs.

Those numbers are dwindling.

For many it is not a day of celebration. In America, the only nation that marks a day like this to commemorate the conclusion of the year’s harvest (did you forget?), there are more people than ever living in dire poverty.

So many people are either out-of-work or they have taken on such low-paying menial jobs they barely have the price of a can of beans. For them: forget the turkey dinner, unless some public charity feels pity, or they can find a Salvation Army kitchen within walking distance.

The nation’s homeless also are going without the traditional turkey dinner. And there may be a lot of them. More people are said to be living on the streets of America today than at any time during the Great Depression. We aren’t aware of them because they are being ignored by the media and the busy world that passes them by.

What celebration will there be this day for the parents, relatives and friends of the 1,237 men and women who fell to the enemy’s bombs and bullets in Iraq. Or the thousands more that are coming home too wounded and mentally impaired to return to normal lives? And yet this senseless war rages on with no apparent end in sight. It is the Bush Administration’s version of Vietnam.

Last year when Mr. Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad and served turkey to military soldiers stationed there, there was a general sense of hope that the conflict in that country would be ending soon. But Mr. Bush and all of our best military strategists were wrong. They did not calculate on the tenacity of the enemy that awaited us in that foreign land. The war rages on today. The soldiers come home daily in body bags. There is no turkey dinner today for them.

The day has become an ugly sham. Maybe it always was.

That Thanksgiving is for us a Christian celebration of “gifts” from an external god has made the day a commercial con game, just like so many other national holidays.

The concept was established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 but was never established as a national holiday by Congress until 1941. Thus the holiday is not an old one and there is no tradition. Contrary to public myth, it did not originate with the Pilgrims at Plymouth.

Yet the idea of celebrating the autumn harvest during the Autumn Equinox is ancient. It has nothing to do with Christianity. It is all part of man’s relationship to the natural cycles of the Mother Earth.

That we have twisted this event around and linked it to Christianity probably has a lot to do with the darkness now associated with the holiday.

Instead of a time of joy, Thanksgiving, like the other perverted Christian celebrations that follow (Christmas and Easter) is a bleak time of endurance for the entire world. For us, it is a day of melancholy and sadness. And the clouds are about as thick overhead this season as I have ever seen them.

Would-be prophet Ed Dames last month made the rash prediction on the Coast-to-Coast night radio talk show that people should enjoy this Thanksgiving because it will be the last good holiday the United States will have.

While Dames can neither remote view with accuracy nor make correct prophetic predictions, his suggestion that this holiday season will be among the last of the “good” ones may not be too far off. It does not take a prophet to see this, however.

We have just allowed the Christian right-wing element of this country re-elect an Armageddon President to a second term in the White House. Mr. Bush already has led this nation into two Middle Eastern conflicts that show no signs of resolution. And he now threatens Iran.

Mr. Bush also has set the stage for a world conflict with China. His Southern Baptist theology leads him to believe that if he can use his power to launch an apocalyptic war, it will force the “savior-god” Jesus Christ to keep his promise and return in the clouds.

The real prophet remote viewer in the world, Aaron C. Donahue, said China and the United States will be at war before Bush leaves office. In the end China will win the war and the United States will fall.

Donahue made that prediction at least one year ago when he correctly said Mr. Bush would be re-elected to a second term.

From that perspective, this Thanksgiving may indeed be among the last of the holidays celebrated by a majority of households still untouched by the horrors that loom in the very near future.