The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is a tradition in my home. It is the only time of the year that I will sit through three hours of marketing. When the kids were small, there was no (very loud) heckling. Now that they are grown, we do our own little version of MST3K.
The Macy's Day Parade really does highlight the worst of the worst of Americana. This year, for example they even isolated their diversity segment -- no Native Americans or Hispanics scattered throughout the parade; they were all collected about 3/4 of the way through.
But every year, they have one awesome event.
This year there was Arlo Guthrie singing This Land Is Your Land. Arlo is a Thanksgiving tradition, and if your family doesn't listen to Alice's Restaurant on Thanksgiving, then you might as well not have turkey. And his father Woody Guthrie wrote the freedom songs of the 20th century.
And this year, when the Supreme Court has declared corporations to be individuals, and Congress refused to increase the national debt by funding medical care for 9/11 first responders, there was Arlo reminding us that this land, indeed, was our land.
He even sang a verse that I believe was a new one, and spoke to us in 2010. But I could not provide it here; Macy's blocked out the you-tube videos, due to copyright infringement.
Irony abounds, and while this land still does belong to you and me, we need to continue to fight for it, and I am thankful that Arlo was there to sing it to us.
The Macy's Day Parade really does highlight the worst of the worst of Americana. This year, for example they even isolated their diversity segment -- no Native Americans or Hispanics scattered throughout the parade; they were all collected about 3/4 of the way through.
But every year, they have one awesome event.
This year there was Arlo Guthrie singing This Land Is Your Land. Arlo is a Thanksgiving tradition, and if your family doesn't listen to Alice's Restaurant on Thanksgiving, then you might as well not have turkey. And his father Woody Guthrie wrote the freedom songs of the 20th century.
And this year, when the Supreme Court has declared corporations to be individuals, and Congress refused to increase the national debt by funding medical care for 9/11 first responders, there was Arlo reminding us that this land, indeed, was our land.
He even sang a verse that I believe was a new one, and spoke to us in 2010. But I could not provide it here; Macy's blocked out the you-tube videos, due to copyright infringement.
Irony abounds, and while this land still does belong to you and me, we need to continue to fight for it, and I am thankful that Arlo was there to sing it to us.
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