Gratitude is Overrated

It’s Thanksgiving. Today is the day we’re supposed to be grateful. To be honest, I am grateful about some things.

For example:
-My husband.
-My job.
-My friends.
-My cat.
-My car.
-My house.

Again, these are some of the things that I am happy to have. I’ll always be happy to have them. On the other hand, there is a lot of stuff for which I am not grateful because they either piss me off or they cause pain to others.

Things I am not grateful for:
-The Grand Nagus.
-The current political climate.
-The raging transphobia and homophobia I have seen on Facebook.
-The emboldened asshats on Facebook who are acting racist/transphobic/homophobic.
-The fact that we have no BotCon.
-The fact that HasCon is not a convention but a trade show.
-The fact that we have literal goddamn Nazis in this country.
-The fact that we have people making excuses for the Grand Nagus.
-Every time the Grand Nagus tweets or opens his mouth.
-The shitty handling of Puerto Rico’s cleanup.
-Climate change deniers.
-Roy “I Get Older, They Stay the Same Age” Moore.

I could go on. But I won’t. I think you see my point.

Now, I’m going to be honest here: yes, we should be grateful for what we have. But sometimes, we have to be ungrateful for some of the things that are going on right now, for the things that are affecting others, for some of the things that are causing other people pain. For those things, I have no gratitude and I am unashamedly ungrateful for them. It would be stupid to be happy about those sorts of things.

Yes, we should be grateful but that doesn’t mean we should rest on our laurels. If we’re ungrateful about something, we should damn well not sit around and fake that we’re happy. We need to do something about it. Get involved. Speak out. That way, we can have a bit more to be grateful about next year. Make the next Thanksgiving, if you celebrate such at all, a better one for all people.

It’s a thought.