For many activists Thanksgiving is a day filled with conflicting emotions. Family get together or Native American genocide day? Communal food or turkey slaughter? Below is a letter sent by a veteran Green activist to his daughter submitted for your Thanksgiving Day consideration:

by Mitchel Cohen

I sent the following to my daughter, Malika, who'd invited me to her and her mom's house in LI for Thaksgiving dinner. (What makes this harder is that I rarely get to see her any more, as she's away in school in Boston.)
Your thoughts, por favor!

Hiya Malika!

On the one hand I want to spend time with you and this is a good opportunity.

On the other I already almost wrecked Jennifer's Thanksgiving Party a couple of years ago because I was so pissed off at people who wanted so much to be part of this annual national ritual that they put their minds and consciences on hold and joined in slaughtering over 80 million turkeys every year! (Last year I had vegetarian Thanksgiving meal in San Francisco with my Brother Robert, Susan (Cathryn's sister) and her boyfriend Chris. Patrick couldn't come, he was sick.

On the one hand, I love the taste of a well prepared ORGANIC turkey. (The non-organic ones are basically poison, filled with arsenic andother bad chemicals.)

On the other, I am at war with myself over understanding the need to be a vegetarian yet loving to eat turkey, chicken and fish.

One trip to a slaughterhouse would cure anyone -- or almost anyone -- of their illusions or blindspots over how animals are raised, tortured, slaughtered and packaged. You'd have nightmares for the rest of your life.

Still, I do eat chicken, fish and sometimes turkey. But to do so ON DEMAND of this kultcha? No, I will not join in that sickness.

Why not? Am I so special? Would one person's withdrawal from that illness make a difference to anyone except myself?

I need, on Thanksgiving, to APOLOGIZE to all the animals I caused to be murdered by my participation in this carnivorous game.

I need to give THANKS to them for helping to sustain me by sacrificing their own lives.

And to all the people of the world for providing me -- at great sacrifice to themselves -- with the tools I use to write, with the metals and plastics I use every day in computer and pen, with the clothes on my back as the workers die from brown lung in the clothing factories, with the cars I passenger in as people are blown up en masse in Iraq and Afghanistan so the US can have a pipeline for oil to feed its cars. And not only the US ....

Every day just by living in this kulcha I partake in a vast web of complicity with evil, even as I try to extricate myself to the degree possible, even as I try to rip apart that web, tear it down, replace it with a more human, animal-friendly, and ecologically sustainable world.

Let alone the slaughter of American Indians that this holiday was designed to conceal.

I know a number of people are going up to Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts to commemorate "National Genocide Day" with various American Indian groups. I'm not going. That, too, is ritual, and a futile one at that -- speeches, long bus ride, nothing accomplished.

But I do love the taste of turkey .... and good (not canned) cranberry sauce. And organic yams. And the love and friendship of family and comrades.

Your mom will say, "oh shit, here we go again." Yes indeed.

Malika, of course, OF COURSE I want to see you, to be with you. But I think I'd better stay away, for fear of ruining your Thanksgiving .... or of ruining my own.

What do YOU think?

I'm pretty torn up over this. On the one hand .... on the other ....

Hey, maybe you can come in to the City on Friday instead and we can celebrate RESISTANCE, go to a movie, and eat a great vegetarian meal -- and give REAL thanks to those who've gone before and who resisted this celebration of death disguised as fun?

Love,
Mitchel

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Also, have a look at Mitch's 2003 article Why I Hate Thanksgiving