Opinion: In today’s pages: Thanksgiving celebrations, budget cuts and solar flares
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| Ted Rall, Universal Press Syndicate |
On the day before Thanksgiving -- or two days before Black Friday, if that’s a more meaningful calendar entry for you -- the Times’ editorial board comes out strongly in favor of construction-paper costumes of Pilgrims and Native Americans. Its time for warring factions at Claremont Unified School District to end their bickering and let the kids enjoy their traditional celebration of the first Thanksgiving. After all, the lesson from that moment in history is that adversaries can, in fact, find common ground -- a lesson that seems to have been lost on the board members who nixed the costumes:
As for the Claremont school board: No seconds on pumpkin pie for you. Caving to the demands of a small group of oversensitive parents is cowardly and ill serves the district’s children.
If you’re determined to feel badly about the holiday, though, read Brown University historian Karl Jacoby’s op-ed about the second Thanksgiving, celebrated 55 years after the harmonious original.
By that point the Wampanoag Indians were led by Metacom, son of Massasoit (their leader at the original Thanksgiving), and were embroiled in a lengthy war between colonists and Native Americans. Jacoby writes:
Metacom met his end at the hands of a Colonial scouting party in August of 1676. His killers quartered and decapitated his body and sent Metacom’s head to Plymouth, where for two decades it would be prominently displayed on a pike outside the colony’s entrance. That same year, as the violence drew to a close, the colony of Connecticut declared a ‘day of Publique Thankesgiving’ to celebrate ‘the subdueing of our enemies.’
Moving right along, the editorial board also compares Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s ‘badwill tour’ of Latin America with other nations’ efforts to develop commercial ties with those growing markets. And it urges the Los Angeles City Council not to spare the police force or the Department of Water and Power as it cuts spending across city government.
Elsewhere on the op-ed side of the pages, columnist Tim Rutten rails against the shady politics and questionable policy behind the Green Energy and Good Jobs for Los Angeles Act. And writer Tina Dupuy, editor of the fishbowlLA blog, predicts that the latest dysfunctional move contemplated by the L.A. Marathon -- pushing the race back practically into the dog days of summer -- would be its last:
This date change is like moving a minimally popular television to Friday night. It’s a death rattle. It’s about to be canceled for ratings.
And with that, I’m going to run back into the kitchen to work on a traditional Thanksgiving venison.