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| Photo by Molly |
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| Photo by Molly Through the Gateway |
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| Photo by Molly A Hundred Objects Close By |
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| Our 9-1/2 year old beloved Shira |
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| Photo by Molly Our Lady of Supreme Tenderness |
This is such an excellent and vitally important article which illuminates the larger truths behind Thanksgiving ― a holiday which is both celebrated and mourned across our country. And this is why I am not comfortable with simply sharing the blessings and grace experienced within my family on Thanksgiving. Yes, I am deeply grateful for the many ways in which my life and those of my loved ones are blessed.
At the same time, I am also acutely aware of the suffering, the mourning, the brutal injustices, the lies and poisonous propaganda, the destruction and deaths and denials surrounding the history of Thanksgiving, and what is normalized and still believed by too many of us in America. The atrocities of the past continue to haunt and be perpetrated today in America and beyond ― because nothing can be healed, unburdened, and transformed until it is faced.
May more and more of us increasingly embody the courage, activism, profound commitment to truth, and fierce love that is so vital to our individual and collective healing and transformation, to our awakening from the illusions and ignorance that we carry and have absorbed, and to the well-being of all of our sisters and bothers, human and nonhuman, everywhere. We are all related, all connected, all family.
The violence must end.🙏 Molly
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| Indigenous people and allies march through Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the National Day of Mourning on November 27, 2025. © IMAGO / ZUMA Press Wire |
Plymouth, Massachusetts - Each year as many Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, Native people gather on Cole's Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning for the genocide of Indigenous Peoples.
"Once again on so-called Thanksgiving Day, United American Indians of New England and our supporters are gathered on this hill to observe a National Day of Mourning for the Indigenous people murdered by settler-colonialism and imperialism worldwide," UAINE co-leader Kisha James (Aquinnah Wampanoag and Oglala Lakota) said to kick off Thursday's march and rally in the traditional homelands of the Wampanoag people.
"Today marks the 56th time we have gathered here to mourn our ancestors, tear down settler mythologies, and speak truth to power," she added.
The NDOM tradition, started by James' grandfather Wamsutta Frank James, began in 1970. Indigenous activists denounced the atrocities committed by the Pilgrims, boarded a copy of the Mayflower ship, and buried Plymouth Rock in sand.
James said NDOM exists to challenge false narratives around Thanksgiving that cast the day as a celebration of friendship between white settlers and Indigenous people. In reality, the Pilgrims began plundering Native burial sites and winter provisions soon after their arrival.
Today's Thanksgiving holiday is intrinsically linked with this history of colonial violence. James noted that Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop called for a day of thanksgiving in the year 1637, after colonists massacred a Pequot village on the banks of the Mystic River.
"The settler project created by the Pilgrims did not end with the Pilgrims," James said. "The evils that the Pilgrims brought to these shores – racism, slavery, the class system, jails, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy – these evils continue to affect the peoples of Turtle Island and beyond."
"When people perpetuate the Thanksgiving mythology, they are not only erasing the Pilgrims' legacy of settler-colonialism and genocide but also celebrating it."
UAINE co-leader Mahtowin Munro (Oglala Lakota) outlined the pressing concerns in Indian Country today which are a direct continuation of the violence and dispossession targeting Indigenous Peoples. These include federal cuts to food, housing, education, and healthcare programs as well as ICE raids, mass incarceration, increased attacks on trans and Two-Spirit people, and more.
"You may have heard that this country has a vice president who stands up in front of thousands of people and says that when Columbus first got here and the other Europeans first got here, they were shocked because the sacrifice of children was so widespread and that's why they had to bring Christianity to us," Munro said, referring to remarks JD Vance made during a Turning Point USA event last month.
"We're talking about people who are killing children every day – in Palestine, around the world – and they dare to say that about us."
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| A participant raises a sign calling for "Land Back" during the 2025 National Day of Mourning. © IMAGO / ZUMA Press Wire |
Lea Kayali of the Palestinian Youth Movement once again joined the event, saying the annual occasion inspires her to "reflect, especially in these last two years, on grief, loss, and survival."
"Colonialism robs us of mourning itself in this sense because it rips us as Indigenous people from our roots and supplants an ongoing structure of violence – a genocide factory that breaks our bones, steals our lands, and criminalizes our existence," Kayali said.
"When we mourn publicly during colonial onslaught as we do today, we force the world to bear witness to the glorious lives that our people lived," she insisted.
"We as Indigenous Peoples have something that our enemies will never have, and that's a cause worth dying for."
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| People raise a banner reading "No One Is Illegal on Stolen Land" during the 2025 National Day of Mourning. © IMAGO / ZUMA Press Wire |
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| Youth hold a sign calling for "jobs," "food," and "community" over "war," "hate," and "oligarchy" while other participants wear keffiyehs during the 2025 National Day of Mourning. © IMAGO / ZUMA Press Wire |
After almost 50 years behind bars, Leonard Peltier (Anishinabe and Dakota/Lakota) shared a video message from his home on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Reservation.
"I'm happy to hear that you're still exposing Thanksgiving," Peltier said. "It's probably one of the biggest false propaganda information that the American people and American government have ever distributed among people around the world."
The 81-year-old could not be at NDOM in person as he remains in home confinement per the executive commutation issued by former US President Joe Biden on his final day in office.
Peltier had been given a double life sentence on charges of killing FBI special agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams on the Pine Ridge Reservation during a 1975 shootout. The FBI coerced witnesses and excluded and falsified critical evidence in Peltier's 1977 murder trial, resulting in a conviction widely recognized to be illegitimate.
The longtime political prisoner said the US has tried to cover up what it has done to Indigenous Peoples, but that colonial violence is repeating itself today.
"Look what they're doing in Palestine. Look what they're doing in Ukraine. Look now what they're trying in Iran," Peltier warned.
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| Leonard Peltier is pictured on a screen as he speaks via video message during the 2025 National Day of Mourning. © IMAGO / ZUMA Press Wire |
While much of the recent interest in Jeffrey Epstein has focused on the late sexual predator’s relationship with President Donald Trump, his emails also reveal his close relationships with other powerful figures from the worlds of politics, finance, academia and beyond. The thousands of files released by the House Oversight Committee earlier this month include his correspondence from April 2011 through January 2019, after he was already a registered sex offender for abusing underage girls in Florida. The fact that so many prominent and influential people could ignore those crimes is indicative of their membership in a “borderless network of people who are more loyal to each other” than anything else, says journalist Anand Giridharadas. “He had chosen this particular kind of social network, this American power elite, because he could be sure that it would be able to look away.”
Giridharadas is author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World and recently wrote about the Epstein emails for The New York Times opinion section.
Please go here for the original full interview and transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/11/25/anand_giridharadas
Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by "a world of enemies" ― "one against all" ― and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.
When we think of a criminal, we imagine someone with criminal motives. And when we look at Eichmann, he doesn't actually have any criminal motives. Not what is usually understood by "criminal motives." He wanted to go along with the rest. He wanted to say "we," and going-along-with-the-rest and wanting-to-say-we like this were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible. The Hitlers, after all, really aren't the ones who are typical in this kind of situation ― they'd be powerless without the support of others.
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
* * * * *
One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world ― and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end ― is being destroyed.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.
This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.
* * * * *
When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.
Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
* * * * *
Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
Violence is an expression of impotence.
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
* * * * *
Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
To think and to be fully alive are the same.
One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all.
Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is 'in power' we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name. The moment the group, from which the power originated to begin with ... disappears, 'his power' also vanishes.
It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possess neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth and can be radical.
* * * * *
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and ... such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time-span that was given them on earth.
The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then — but from that moment on — will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.
We are free to change the world and start something new in it.
Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
https://philosophybreak.com/reading-lists/hannah-arendt/
This is so worth the time to read and worthy of being shared again and again. Deeply insightful as to what and how we are where we are in America today. And how we can be empowered to act courageously, refuse to surrender our judgment to authority, distinguish between fact and fiction, embrace the miracle of our human agency. Deepest bow of respect and gratitude to Hannah Arendt. May her legacy inform and inspire us all! ― Molly
Just beyond heartbreaking. This administration not only repeatedly demonstrates its criminal roots in fascist policies and practices, but also the utter sadism in the brutal ways that it dehumanizes and terrorizes our human sisters and brothers across our country and beyond. Makes my heart hurt. And horrifies and infuriates me! This madness MUST be stopped! ― Molly
