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Thanksgiving Leftovers

Thanksgiving Leftovers

Last updated on: December 2, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Thanksgiving Leftovers 2025-11-27T15:17:40-05:00 Gene Veith

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Some of you are probably still eating Thanksgiving leftovers (my favorite part of the Thanksgiving feast), so hopefully you won’t mind some leftover reflections on the holiday, since gratitude is appropriate year round.

Here are some thoughts on the subject that I came across on Thanksgiving day that I felt I had to share with you. (The first two came from John Puri’s column at National Review, Thanksgiving: The Conservative’s Holiday. Those of you of the liberal or moderate persuasion, don’t be indignant! Yuval Levin, below, acknowledges your share in the holiday.)

Look Out the Window

From Charles C. W. Cooke on what we should be thankful for:

Look around you. Look at the machine you’re reading this on. Look at the language in which this post is written. Look at your thermostat. Do you have a chair to sit on? That’s all pretty nice, isn’t it? Glance out of the window. Does it look peaceful, stable, prosperous? Other people did that. They wrote the laws and fought the wars and built the roads and did all manner of terrible jobs, and you inherited all of it with no effort whatsoever on your part. I find it difficult to contain my gratitude for this. Long before I was around, people died on battlefields and toiled in laboratories and argued about constitutions so that, one day, I would be able to pour myself a glass of wine and turn on the NFL without worrying that a barbarian in a Viking helmet might barge through the gate and amble to my door. In all honesty, I did nothing to deserve this. One day, I just woke up, and there it all was.

Conservatism and Gratitude

Yuval Levin in a 2013 speech:

To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.

You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed. We should never forget that the people who oppose our various endeavors and argue for another way are well intentioned, too, even when they’re wrong, and that they’re not always wrong.

But we can also never forget what moves us to gratitude, what we stand for and defend: the extraordinary cultural inheritance we have; the amazing country built for us by others and defended by our best and bravest; America’s unmatched potential for lifting the poor and the weak; the legacy of freedom — of ordered liberty — built up over centuries of hard work.

We value these things not because they are triumphant and invincible but because they are precious and vulnerable; because they weren’t fated to happen, and they’re not certain to survive. They need us — and our gratitude for them should move us to defend them and to build on them.

The Word “Thank” Comes from “Think”

Joshua Katz at First Things tells us the linguistic origin of the word “thank”:

Thanking turns out to have quite a lot in common with thinking. The reason the words “think” and “thank” look and sound similar is not a matter of chance. Rather, both go back to a root in the ancestral language of English known as Proto-Indo-European: Generally reconstructed as *tong- “think; feel,” this root is found throughout the Germanic languages (for example, German denken “think” and danken “thank”). . . .

When young children turn “think” into an irregular verb—“think, thank, thunk”—they are doing so by analogy with “drink, drank, drunk,” “sink, sank, sunk,” and the like. And while it’s a mistake, it does contain a hint of etymological truth. . . . Giving thanks is, or at least should be, a mindful activity. . . .

The original meaning of the noun “thank” (Old English þanc) was “thought,” especially “good thought.”

So not only should we think about what we are thankful for, just thinking should fill us with feelings of gratitude. Being thoughtful should make us thankful.

Land Acknowledgements and Ethnic Cleansing

One feature of today’s Thanksgiving festivities is progressives telling us that we should not be celebrating. Despite the harmony between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans at that first Thanksgiving, we are told that this event marked the beginning of the European settlers stealing the native people’s land.

Similarly, when progressives meet together, it has become obligatory to begin with a “land acknowledgement,” stating that their current location is being held on land that actually belongs to an indigenous tribe.

Noah Smith of the Free Press has written a rejoinder to this practice entitled No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land. He does not at all deny that the land was stolen. “The United States, like all nations,” he says, “was created through territorial conquest.” He says that all nations are on stolen land. The Angles and Saxons conquered Britain and displaced the Celts. The Franks were a Germanic tribe that conquered what is now Gaul to give us France. The Israelites took the promised land from the Canaanites, and Arabs would later take it from the Israelites, who would later take it back.

And this is also true of the indigenous tribes whose lands we are acknowledging:

The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land. The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again. If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.

This is the sad reality of a sinful world. This doesn’t justify such conquests. But they cannot be undone. Smith says trying to do so simply multiplies the injustice. He says

These land acknowledgments are, legally speaking, incorrect—there is no legal sense in which the land on which they are being performed belongs to a Native American tribe. These are moral claims about rightful land ownership. But the moral principle to which they appeal is ethnonationalism—it’s the idea that plots of land are the rightful property of ethnic groups.

There is an obvious moral appeal to these land acknowledgments. They are a way of decrying the brutal, cruel, violent history of conquest and colonization. And they probably feel like a way of standing up for the weak, the marginalized, and the dispossessed.

Yet what should we think of the morality of following the principles behind land acknowledgments to their logical conclusion? “Decolonization” of the land of the U.S. would likely be an act of ethnic cleansing surpassing even the previous conquests—there are 330 million people here now, and very few of them descend from Native Americans. . . .

Of course, “colonizers” could presumably avoid violent death or second-class citizenhood by voluntarily deporting themselves. But where would they go? Take me, for example. My ancestors were Lithuanian Jews. I could leave the country of my birth and go “back” to Lithuania—a land I don’t know, whose language I don’t speak. Yet my ancestors were not “indigenous” to Lithuania either; they moved there from somewhere else. What if the ethnic Lithuanians chose not to accept me? Where would I go then? Israel? But the folks who do land acknowledgments would consider me a “colonizer” there as well.

Would I then wander the Earth, desperately seeking some ethnostate that would allow me and my descendants to live there as a permanently precarious resident alien?

Smith says that we should never fall back into the practice of conquest and that we should remember and support indigenous people. “Tribal organizations still exist—they may notionally represent ethnic groups, but they are institutions. And they are institutions with which the United States has many agreements and legal obligations that must be honored, which often give the tribes sovereignty over areas of land.” He concludes that “the key to respecting and honoring Native Americans” is “not to focus on the tragedies of their past, but to give them the right to build a better future.”

Photo: Leftovers from Thanksgiving 2009, well packaged and labeled By Andrew Nash from Vienna, Austria – Leftover Turkey Dec09 – 9, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55217901

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