Chronicles of a Dying Empire

Chronicles of a Dying Empire

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Chronicles of a Dying Empire
Chronicles of a Dying Empire
Thanksgiving, Thangs Taken, and Why I’m Grateful Today

Thanksgiving, Thangs Taken, and Why I’m Grateful Today

A holiday with brutal and racist origins can still offer something positive if embraced with the right intention

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Shahid Buttar
Nov 24, 2022
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Chronicles of a Dying Empire
Chronicles of a Dying Empire
Thanksgiving, Thangs Taken, and Why I’m Grateful Today
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I’ve taken to calling today’s holiday #ThangsTaken, in a reference to its colonial and ultimately genocidal origins. I’ll share a video below offering a painfully poignant explanation by indigenous youth of an often overlooked history, before returning to some reasons why I feel gratitude today despite the racist roots of the holiday.

Our nation’s racist and brutal history

Five years ago, Teen Vogue published a stunning video featuring a handful of indigenous youth discussing the origins of what we today call Thanksgiving. Their voices demand attention, as does the history they recount.

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Shahid Buttar (find me on Substack) @ShahidForChange
Gratitude is beautiful, and always worth celebrating. It is also a convenient mask to paper over the brutal and racist history our nation grotesquely ignores while focused on family feasts. When giving thanks this #Thanksgiving, take a moment to remember all the #ThangsTaken. https://t.co/sKhhbCb3i4
Twitter avatar for @TeenVogue
Teen Vogue @TeenVogue
"The true story behind Thanksigiving was, after every killing of a whole village, these European settlers celebrated it." Do YOU know the truth about Thanksgiving? Watch as six Native American girls explain the real history behind the holiday. https://t.co/MXfXzzpYad
5:08 PM ∙ Nov 24, 2022
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If you’d rather not use Twitter, you can still watch the video on either YouTube or Facebook. It’s worth taking two minutes to watch it.

Really, go ahead. My words below can wait.

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It’s easy to forget that the challenges we face today—capital run amok around the world, ecocide, and crises stretching from violations of fundamental rights to outright predatory state & vigilante violence—all trace their origins to longstanding colonial patterns that impacted indigenous North Americans starting even before industrialization.

A ceremony worth engaging

All that said, I always appreciate the invitation to consider and express gratitude. Even though today’s holiday is rooted in a horrifying genocidal mania that too many are too quick to forget, the celebration of thanks that it has come to embody holds profound worth—especially for we who today inherit a civilization founded on taking, rather than giving.

Beyond today’s holiday—and its origins—remain each of us, our communities, and a future that we all share together. Gratitude won’t be enough to reclaim a livable future from our institutions hell bent on destroying it, but giving thanks for whatever remains seems to me like a necessary (even if also insufficient) element of that project.

Whether with plants, pets, a partner, children, friends, or family, I hope you enjoy the blessing of community today—and that you find many reasons for gratitude not only today, but every day.

My reasons for gratitude

Having felt it more at some times than others, I’ve come to recognize that gratitude is one necessary component of happiness. In that spirit, here are a few things for which I’m grateful this season:

  • An inspiring labor strike among workers in universities from California (where I live) to the United Kingdom (where I was born).

  • Eyeglasses (seriously; I dropped mine the other day and managed to shatter a piece of plastic that helps keep the frame intact, but then picked up some super glue a few hours later and pieced it back together, which is to say I’m grateful for being able to see, that my eyeglasses survived, and also for the excuse to feel like McGuyver).

  • Rain on my garden (from which I’ll share some photos below for paid subscribers), snow in the mountains, and each of the parts of nature that have survived the ongoing onslaught of industrial capital and the global death machine it has built.

  • The chance to share my views in public, as I did earlier this week in conversation with the always insightful Briahna Joy Gray.

  • The results of my campaigns for federal office, including our various impacts on public policy, the chance to inform and mobilize thousands, and my opportunity to be liberated to pursue my own happiness.

  • The chance to have planted a few warning signs for the future, as I tried to do through my congressional campaigns and continuing public writing.

  • Each of the tens of thousands of supporters who enabled my campaigns for Congress, the grassroots organizing and policy advocacy that preceded it, and my continuing efforts to hold power accountable.

  • (Speaking of holding power accountable, mark your calendar for 12/15, when you’ll be invited to join us via zoom as we appear in federal court for our lawsuit to hold the Hearst Corporation accountable for publishing racist election disinformation that insulated corruption and kept Pelosi in Congress despite an indefensible policy record for which she has never once answered in a debate. I’m especially grateful for the work of our legal counsel, Gautam Dutta, and the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School, which submitted an amicus brief supporting our position)

  • The technology that allows me to connect with you right now, even as other applications of tech are driving communities apart and tearing our country at the seams.

  • A chance to recently see family who I’d not joined in person since before the beginning of the pandemic.

  • A new career on which I’m embarking next week (which I’ll describe for paid subscribers below).

  • The chance to live in California, just a few blocks from one of the most beautiful parks in the world, in an iconic neighborhood where a global movement seeking peace, love and harmony emerged two generations ago.

  • All of my many teachers, from my mother to my plants, professors, mentors, partners, friends, and creative collaborators.

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Plants help keep me rooted

Care for any living being is a blessing that moves in all directions.

My mother cultivated plants both indoors and outdoors. I used to help her in the garden before adolescence turned my attention in other directions, and have long wished I’d paid more attention (to a great many things) when she was still with us. 

Immediately after my mom passed away in 2016, I started noticing plants in ways I never had before. Despite not having a green thumb in the past, I started cultivating plants of various kinds and discovered a profound connection through them to something far beyond any of us.

As a middle-aged man without a family, I’ve come to see my plants as the closest things I have to children. (No offense to my nieces & nephews! I love & adore them deeply but have never been ultimately responsible for keeping them alive.)

Care for any living being is a blessing that moves in all directions. My plants remind me how fragile—and resilient—life remains in the face of all the dysfunction and horror that I see in the world beyond my back yard. It’s among the reasons why I’ve come to see plants as among my teachers.

Whether with plants, pets, a partner, children, friends, or family, I hope you enjoy the blessing of community today—and that you find many reasons for gratitude not only today, but every day.

Some personal news 

This plant started out as a small cutting, discarded by the side of the road, that I picked up by a construction site on my way home from the train one day back in either 2017 or 2018. Watching it grow has been fascinating. It seems better adapted to San Francisco’s climate (in each of the three neighborhoods in which I’ve lived since then) than most of my other plants, and every branch culminates in a mandala.

Paid subscribers can see some more photos from my garden. My plants help keep me grounded, so consider this something like a chance to meet (in the same spirit as a brother from another mother) my kids from another kingdom and read a brief summary of my plans this winter. 

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