Happy Bird Day

I found this posted on the comments section of TheMorningSun.com from Obamanation, one of our regular contributors. With a little editing, I thought it was worth passing along:

During the darkest hours of the Civil War, Abe Lincoln decide to create a holiday, a propaganda holiday, to force a broken nation to overlook its troubles and be thankful for the good times of a Civil War.
Like freeing the slaves, Lincoln couldn’t have cared less, but when the Northerners started to have second thoughts about Lincoln, the war and life in general, one needs diversions.
Freeing the slaves and creating Thanksgiving were just a couple of his best-known tricks. Declaring people free means nothing if they are still treated like slaves, and what kind of nation celebrates a civil war anyway?
Today’s Thanksgiving is a bizarre ritual comprising corny presidential turkey pardons, lame parade coverage, a turkey dinner at noon, badly played football, travel problems, Christmas advertising, and some weird unwritten law that says you can’t talk about anything but what you are thankful for.
There are four kinds of ways people express their thanks on Thanksgiving.
• The Traditional – Friends, family and health. Simple, sweet, and to the point without grandstanding.
• The Modern – A laundry list of things they have. More of a bragging contest than true thanks. Just another way of some jerkball to rub it into others that they are doing better/are better than the next guy.
• The Sarcastic – A loophole in the Thanksgiving pact that allows smart donkeys a way to truly express their bitterness and spite.
• The Innocent – Ask a little kid what they are thankful for and they might reply “cats and monsters.” [Mark’s note: One of the kids once said he was thankful for boogers.]
After careful deliberation I have decided this Thanksgiving I am very thankful that the guy in Elm Hall will be open and selling pizza on Thanksgiving, and that my wife is hot, because after eating dinner at noon, watching the Lions lose, while pretending civil war, and Christmas is not just around the corner, I just might want something that is truly great.