David McElroy

Each year at this time, school children all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.

It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving’s real meaning.

The official story has the pilgrims boarding the Mayflower, coming to America and establishing the Plymouth colony in the winter of 1620-21. This first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. But the survivors are hard working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the Indians. The harvest of 1621 is bountiful. The Pilgrims hold a celebration, and give thanks to God. They are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land He has given them.

The official story then has the Pilgrims living more or less happily ever after, each year repeating the first Thanksgiving. Other early colonies also have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called America.

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

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One of the key story points in “The Wizard of Oz” is that a magical man with all powers ruled the entire land from the Emerald City and could grant whatever he chose to give out of the goodness of his heart. Some people believe the same of the U.S. president.

The Ohio State Buckeyes are 11-0 right now, with just one game to go. Ohio State’s group of football fans is as rabid as any of the other top 15 or 20 college football programs, and they would normally be excited about a possible chance to play for the national championship. There’s just one problem. The Buckeyes are on probation this year and are ineligible to play a post-season game. That was part of the punishment they suffered because of a cheating scandal a few years back.

Now, I understand that a sane person would wonder how these two stories are going to tie together. But even though the ruling body of college football — the NCAA — has judged Ohio State guilty and handed down the sanctions, some of the school’s fans are unhappy. They don’t think it’s fair. So they actually started a petition on the White House website asking Barack Obama to intervene — and somehow declare that Ohio State must be allowed to play for the national title. Here’s what the petition said:

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Most people seem to have very strong feelings about who’s right in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, despite knowing remarkably little about the history surrounding it. Do the details of the Middle East conflicts make your eyes glaze over, because you’ve heard the same stories over and over again? The Onion had a classic article five years ago making the point that these news articles are basically interchangeable as far as Americans are concerned.

As the fighting between Israel and the Palestinians flares up yet again, so are tensions between supporters of the two sides. On Facebook, it’s been pretty heated. When I read the comments from partisans on both sides, you’d think that each side was reading only half of the news and facts from the Middle East — and the other side was reading only the other half of the news and facts.

You can almost take much of their rhetoric (from both sides) and switch it to the other side by changing the names. The cheerleaders for the two sides don’t seem to understand that it’s a complex dispute with fault on both sides, not something that can easily be reduced to a tale of heroes and villains.

I’ve been surprised in the last few days to get questions from people who really don’t know that much about the dispute, people who hear both sides screaming at each other and don’t know what to believe. As a result, I’d like to take a quick look at some of the basic facts of the conflict and show you why I don’t see either side as “good.”

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