If you, like me, are a settler-colonialist on the part of Turtle Island that is occupied as the “United States of America”—or a descendant of people who were enslaved on this land, or a survivor of the genocides my ancestors committed—you might have a complex relationship to this day, simultaneously known as Thanksgiving and the National Day of Mourning.

Wherever you live, you’re also being bombarded by advertisements about the “biggest sales of the year” from companies you love, like, and loathe. Meanwhile, there’s a call for a mass economic blackout this week that many of us are participating in.

It’s easy for us to fall into judging each other for how we exist and survive within the extended apocalypse that's been unfolding. To quietly don a veil of superiority that separates us from our comrades who are wading through the same struggles, making their own path.

I choose not to celebrate Thanksgiving, but that doesn't erase the fact that I occupy stolen land.

I can't afford to buy anything this year, so it's easy to participate in boycotts—but that doesn't heal the spending urge that's been stoked by trauma under capitalism.

We need ritual. We need connection. We need communal care.

And those are things we should easily be able to share during a season that's purportedly about all of those things.

Except everything has been tainted by colonization, by hierarchy, by destructive energies that keep us disconnected and lonely while we're busier than ever.

I hope you'll take time this weekend to reflect on your relationship to the land you live on, and to the systems you live by. I invite you to pause and reflect on the judgments you hold—what yardstick you're trying to measure up to, the standards you hold others to, and the ways that these judgments might keep you isolated.

It's less important to track all the fuck-ups, and more important to find ways to build solidarity.

So, however you're spending this time, there's a place in the movement for you. Whatever your starting point is, you are welcome here. I'm not running you through a battery of purity tests. Because we need all of us. And we're all surviving in a difficult, ugly world.

Hold onto the vision you have for a brighter tomorrow. Let's keep showing up to make it a reality.

If you're reading this and haven't joined the Impure Leftist list yet, you can do that here:

Much love,

Nat