CommentsACCORDING TO LIZ - THX 1138 was, and is, an iconic American movie set in the 25th century where the workforce has been drugged into submission.
Human emotions, sexuality and individualism are suppressed, and mind-numbing platitudes from a state-controlled parody of Catholicism ensure all the drones toe the line.
When his roommate switches her drugs for his, the drones designated THX 1138 and LUH 3417 awaken to the rigid dystopia in which they live. She is destroyed but THX escapes his job, building robo-cops, and flees up a ventilation shaft onto what has become a pristine planet surface and experiences the beauty of Earth for the first time.
Fifty years after its arrival in theaters, this movie still has a lot to say about what is happening today.
There’s another meaning for THX.
It’s the abbreviation for Thanksgiving, conceived as a day of gratitude towards God and those Native Americans who helped the newly arrived colonists survive… but today, might more appropriately qualify as a day of atonement.
While it used to represent home and family, tradition, Pilgrims and Norman Rockwell America, we now recognize that first Thanksgiving as occurring on the eve of the mass destruction of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, what we now call North America.
In 1992 on the 500thanniversary of the arrival of Columbus in this new-to-Europeans continent, those radicals up in Berkeley introduced Indigenous Peoples Day to replace the blood and oppression of the white man with a celebration of the original inhabitants of the land.
Twenty-five years ago, Los Angeles replaced its Columbus Day holiday with a day paying respect to native Americans.
This was one small step on the path towards acknowledging the damages caused by the 1452 papal Doctrine of Discovery which authorized the domination of people of color and the natural world by the so-called “Christian” nations.
We should also reflect on roots of the fear that many of us of European heritage have about losing the things we (think we) own. Our culture of “stuff” – stuffing the holes in our lives with things, not love and humanity, trying to buy our way out of our psychic pain.
We should take time to reflect on whether the concept of private land ownership should survive or if we can change our understanding to allow us to gift our world to our children; that our obligation is to curate the earth, not to rape it.
More recently we’ve seen the rise of the LANDBACK campaign across the US and around the world to “rematriate” – to return territories stolen from indigenous peoples to their care; something that also opens possibilities for reducing global warming and repairing the environment.
Along with our indigenous peoples, all Americans need to move towards being respectful of mother earth and acknowledging the importance of proper stewardship of the land.
And accepting the validity of many indigenous claims, moving towards reconciliation, even or perhaps especially the demand for the US government to return Mount Rushmore and the sacred indigenous lands surrounding it, where the carving of presidential faces is a symbol of American oppression which has been commercialized to the point that it is internationally known as a symbol of white supremacy and colonization.
Many may think it's ridiculous but the rematriation of Mount Rushmore would be a symbolic gesture of far greater gravitas and meaning than the physical transfer of the land.
Today, choose to embrace the spirit of inclusiveness throughout the country, around the world as a global we-everybody, and stop with the us-versus-them mentality.
This must include treatment of the land as belonging to us all, not just corporate profit-mongers, and the transformation of Thanksgiving away from just another season in the retailing year.
Let’s take this Thanksgiving as a time to stop whining about the family dramas and complaining about the travel and expense.
Let’s make it a time to stop spreading what’s wrong with the world and celebrate what’s going right.
To celebrate the continuing cycles of life and our own humanity.
That whatever our shared or conflicting pasts may have been, today is a new opportunity, a time to give greetings and thanks to each other as human beings.
And to express our gratitude to mother earth, to the sun above and the earth below, to the winds that blow, for flowing waters and life-sustaining rains, the wonders of plants and animals, the birds and the bees, our health and intelligence, our heroes and heroines, and their and our teachers.
For people in Kansas standing up to the regressives on the Supreme Court to ensure Kansan women have the right to control their own bodies.
Liz Cheney standing up for democracy.
Record numbers of young people voting for their future.
Increasing focus on the issues that matter – affordable housing, healthcare and education.
Cherishing the wonder of our bodies and our health and having the opportunity to reflect on and celebrate the lives of those no longer with us.
Welcoming the sun as it rises each day and glorying in the gift of friends and family to share it with.
True gratitude must empty people of hate and all other negative emotions, overflowing to embrace our enemies as well as our loved ones.
We need not just one day of thanksgiving but to be grateful each and every day for all that enriches our lives.
Take this Thanksgiving as an opportunity to sit down with friends and family and appreciate what is good in the world around us, and to dedicate the future to humankind climbing, like THX 1138, out of the hole dug by putting corporate profits above quality of living.
And at sunset today, the best we can hope to say is that we have been well-loved and have loved well in return.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions.)
