Where have you gone Bill O’Reilly? Thanksgiving is turning its lonely eyes to you.
Don’t look surprised. Thanksgiving is America’s holiday. In fact it’s the most American holiday on the calendar, bar none. It’s a time to celebrate bounty, home and hearth, and to give thanks for all the blessings of an American life. For centuries it’s been a time to rest and give thanks.
No more.
In the new Wal-Mart America, where low paid worker drones are now among the most likely to rely on government subsidies and assistance programs like food stamps, it’s just another particularly exhausting work day.
The truth is Thanksgiving is looking less and less like an American holiday and more like another workday in communist China, where workers are seen as expendable and so their objections are overlooked.
Controversy’s still growing over these early big box store openings, but a very uncharacteristic sound is emanating from the fabulist of Fox News: the sound of silence.
You’ve fought the War on Christmas, you’ve taken up the War on Christians, you’ve scoffed at the War on Guns and you’ve groused at the War on Women - but where were you in the War on the American Worker this Thanksgiving Bill O’Reilly?
Look at the facts: Wal-Mart employs the equivalent of roughly half the population of Ireland, with an estimated 1.4 million employees in the US. But for all their hard work Wal-Mart employees are among the most likely to rely on government subsidies and assistance programs.
America’s wealthiest family runs the company, and its financial success has frequently been attributed, at least in part, to its workers low wages.
But no one who works full time in America should be dependent on government subsidies, right Bill? Bill? Are you there Bill?
Perhaps if he spent less time shouting about Christmas and actually read what Christ had to say about income inequality you’d realize he’d be more disturbed by the gradual erosion of the few precious holidays reserved for Americas hard pressed under classes.
Who’s looking out for you is O’Reilly’s sentimental tag-line. Well it turns out it’s not the multi-millionaire Harvard educated anchorman from Levittown, who still sometimes passes himself off as a man of the people.
Bill O’Reilly isn’t the people; it’s been decades since he was anything other than the one percent. How else to explain his profound and implicating silence as the little guy gets squeezed and squeezed?
Some commentators say that America’s shoppers are demanding the earlier opening times, so that retailers have no choice but to devour what’s left of the holidays.
But that’s nonsense – most mall workers are actually protesting the early Thanksgiving openings. In 2012, for example, over 200,000 people signed a petition urging Target not to open that evening. They didn’t listen.
It’s not demand, it’s really financial desperation that’s the driver of these early openings. If you can’t afford a nice flat screen TV for 364 days of the year but you can during that one Thanksgiving sale, well that’s the demand explained.
But wouldn’t it be better to have a living wage that gave you real choices rather than a price cut that depended on good luck? Increasingly, these one day sales can be deadly, with stampedes and even shootings occurring. That doesn’t sound like the holiday spirit to anyone.
So it would be helpful to have America’s foremost defender of Christmas speak out now in defense of Thanksgiving – but he’s MIA.
If Bill was really serious about putting Christ back into Christmas then income inequality should really be at top of O’Reilly’s Christmas list – but as his total silence over Thanksgiving shows us, it isn’t and it never going to be.
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