Thanksgiving – a day to honor all life

The origins of the Thanksgiving celebration are not as blessed as most people think. Thanksgiving is a quintessentially American holiday, so much so that it is not just a holiday, but really is one of our Holy Days, almost universally celebrated by Americans. In its sacredness, families get together to celebrate one genocide (against Native Americans) by committing another (against turkeys). Can we celebrate in good faith and conscience?

On Thanksgiving Day, we give thanks. We give thanks for being the invader, the exploiter, the greedy, the colonizer, the thief, indeed the genocidaire. As Mark Twain points out in his War Prayer, wishing and being thankful for one’s own success and victory is, at the very same time, wishing and being thankful for another’s defeat and destruction. Do we want to make these kinds of wishes and give these kinds of thanks?

I do not wish to labor the negative history of what Thanksgiving represents, because most people visiting this blog will most probably already be vegetarian and much more conscious in their eating habits. On this day, therefore, Food for Life encourages one and all to be consistent with the true spirit of Thanksgiving by sharing pure food with love and respect for all of God’s creation. Do not conform to the bogus traditions perpetrated by the masses, but rather stand strong on principle and make this day a day where you honor God and all of creation for what it truly is – our larger spiritual family.

Food for Life believes strongly that food in its purest form can speak all languages. It has the power to unite and heal and more importantly create real peace and prosperity in the world. We feel that such food, given in a spirit of love is the solution to all problems. Simply because food is central to every cultural gathering, every spiritual holiday, every ritual, every battle, every celebration and of course, without food there is no meaning or future for any family.

Thanksgiving therefore should be day that highlights the importance of food in our life and how much it is critical to our physical, mental and spiritual health. By eating flesh on this day, we in effect defile this day and lose touch with the very essence of our life. For by taking the life of another we offend God’s creation and abuse the blessing of what human life affords us. Instead of eating a turkey, Americans should invite a Turkey to dinner and feed it as we would do with any other animate being that came asking for a meal.

The Farm Animal Reform Movement (FARM) has this to say:

Abusing and killing an innocent bird betrays the life-affirming spirit of giving thanks for our life, health, and happiness. The nearly 300 million turkeys killed each year in the U.S. spend their entire lives crammed in large sheds with little room to move. Artificially inseminated and selectively bred to gain enormous amounts of weight, they suffer heart attacks, broken limbs, lameness, and death from their genetically-induced accelerated growth rate. Most of these same conditions apply to “free range” turkeys.

Let the madness and hypocrisy stop once and for all.

Swami Prabhupada, the founder of Food for Life, believed that human wars are the direct result of slaughtering innocent animals. “It is karma,” he explained.

Prabhupada offered a reason, which he repeated in books and lectures. For example, he wrote in a Shrimad Bhagavatam commentary to 4.26.5:

In this age of Kali the propensity for mercy is almost nil. Consequently there is always fighting and wars between men and nations. Men do not understand that because they unrestrictedly kill so many animals, they also must be slaughtered like animals in big wars. This is very much evident in the Western countries. In the West, slaughterhouses are maintained without restriction, and therefore every fifth or tenth year there is a big war in which countless people are slaughtered even more cruelly than the animals.

In lectures, Prabhupada would express himself more emotionally, as in this one in Los Angeles in 1973:

The desire is never satiated that “You have killed so many animals. Now you don’t—” No, he will go on, go on killing, killing, killing, killing, killing, killing. He is never satisfied, “Now I have killed so many. No more, stop.” No, there is no stoppage. . . . The injunction is “Thou shalt not kill,” but he will kill and kill and kill and kill, and still, he want to be satisfied. Just see. The Bible says, “Thou shalt not kill,” and they are simply engaged in killing business, and still they want to be happy. . . . Therefore Krishna says, “Yes, you be killed by occasional world war. You must be killed. You have created this situation. You must be killed. You may be American or Englishman or German or this or that. You may be very proud of your nationality. But you must be killed.” This is the position. Ishvarasya viceshtitam [the will of the Lord]: “You have killed so many animals. Now wholesale killing, one bomb. One atom bomb. Be killed.”

It is days like Thanksgiving when this wholesale human karma is elevated to astronomical proportions, thus paving the way for more suffering. There may not be much we can do to change the collective karma of the American public, but if we choose to reject these bogus killing traditions we can at least feel satisfied that we did not contribute to the chaos that is being created day after day and we will be one step closer to perfecting our human lives and becoming self realized.