Thanksgiving and historical pessimism: Is it worth it?

I will warn you right now that this post has nothing to do with WoW. I don't intent to put up many posts like this, but this issue has arisen recently as it does every year. When wow.com put up a post talking about Pilgrim's Bounty (I don't remember which one it is), the comments section was ablaze with people eager to bring up the darker side of the history of Thanksgiving, about how the Pilgrims massacred the Native Americans and stole their land in exchange for cheap trinkets due to a misunderstanding between the two groups about the concept of land ownership. I'm sure you've heard it all before from your pessimistic friends and your high school history teachers who like to pretend that they are the only ones willing to tell you the darker side of history, so I won't go into it in detail. The question I pose to you today: are those people who insist on looking at the darker side of Thanksgiving right or wrong?

Let's forget that for a moment and think about the purpose of this holiday. Some people will tell you that the purpose of Thanksgiving is to remember when the Pilgrims and the Native Americans came together in partnership and cooperation, but really, the true purpose of Thanksgiving is to remember the things we are thankful for. That, as well as to stuff ourselves with food and visit with friends and relatives. All of these activities contribute towards one goal; enjoyment. In the end, that is the true purpose of any holiday: enjoying ourselves, giving ourselves a break from the doldrums of day-to-day life.

In this respect, historical Thanksgiving pessimism (HTP, from now on) is quite misguided in that it distracts us from the true purpose of the holiday; enjoying ourselves. After all, the past is the past; no amount of white guilt or moping about history will change what was done to the Native Americans or the fact that those atrocities were necessary for us to get where we are today as a country. From a purely practical standpoint, HTP doesn't benefit anyone.

That said, there's a danger in forgetting about our history. As anyone who studies history will tell you, the one thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history (paraphrased from Hegel). In other words, throughout history, man has repeated the same mistakes he has made before, and much of history is us just repeating mistakes we have made in the past and suffering the consequences from it. With that in mind, HTP does serve the function of forcing us to keep in mind our past mistakes such that we may not repeat them. Even if its purpose is negative, its intent is not.

So, what's the verdict? Even though HTP does prevent us from enjoying the holidays as much as we could, it stems from the necessity of remembering the mistakes of our past so that we do not repeat them in the future. So, the next time someone brings up HTP in conversation, you are completely justified in calling them a pessimist and a party-pooper, but their intentions are still good, even if they don't realize it.