Thanksgiving should not be a holiday.

You all have been taught that Thanksgiving is a paradoxical holiday where we celebrate seemingly peaceful colonists who “discovered” America and were eager to interact with the indigenous people. We also know that Native American people were forced into reservations during a genocide enforced by our so-called Founding Fathers.

Here we are years later. People use Thanksgiving as an excuse to get out of work to spend time with families and stuff themselves. And, as every year another Thanksgiving passes, it is another year that the injustices put up against the Native Americans are ignored and trivialized.

Furthermore, not only are we ignoring the people who showed the colonists how to survive in an unfamiliar land and were crucial to the creation of our beloved United States of America, we are also ignoring the 15 percent of the entire population that are living in poverty without adequate amounts of food. This means that while you and your relatives are taking a day off to stuff themselves, there are literally at least 272,035,310 people struggling to eat anything everyday.

The fact that we can ignore the cultural definition of a holiday to create a new meaning that we see fit is astonishing. Take a holiday such as the fourth of July. Instead of celebrating our independence, we use it as another day of the year where we can selfishly bask in our own glory, stuff our faces with hot-dogs, and celebrate something that the holiday isn’t even about.

Thanksgiving is a day where you can take a load off, be with family, and eat a good meal. Thanksgiving is a holiday that is all about counting our blessings and sharing a meal with loved ones. In our, high-tech world, Thanksgiving is a time when we can focus on the truly important things in life: spending time with those we love and taking stock of all we have to be grateful for.

However, if we are celebrating family on the backs of people who are struggling because America failed to help them, Thanksgiving shouldn’t be celebrated. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be with your family and give thanks, however it is wrong to do it on a day that is also ignoring the deaths of thousands of people who reached out and wanted to help Americans years and years ago.