Thanksgiving

In 1934 – that’s 84 years ago – the first televised NFL Thanksgiving game was played. And it was played in Detroit, Michigan. The Lions played the Bears, and, naturally, lost to the Bears. The Lions have hosted the Thanksgiving game every season since, and every season it’s the same thing from people who don’t get it: “Why do the Lions get the Thanksgiving game every year? They suck.”

This misses the point. The Lions get the Thanksgiving game every year because it’s ours. It has always been ours, and it always will be ours. And I say the Thanksgiving game because the Dallas Cowboys stole it from us, copied it, and lived off of what we built to become “America’s Team.” As metaphors for gentrification go, that one is tough to beat.

We’re used to people taking from us. We’re used to being left broken in a ditch while the Dallas Cowboys of the world leave town counting their money – counting our money. We understand this because it has been woven into the very character of Detroit, of Michigan.

These days, people mock Detroit, mock Michigan. They sneer and make jokes about abandoned buildings, about burned out husks of our history, about people who can’t even get a glass of clean drinking water, and it’s all true. It sucks, but it’s true. But the thing is, is that it wasn’t always true, and the other thing is that it’s not our fault. You want to blame us? We’re the victims here. We built something, we made something, and that something is called the United States of America. And you clean-faced bastards stole it from us.

You wanna know why the Lions got the first televised Thanksgiving game? Because Detroit was the heart of this country. Detroit was bigger then, swelled with internal immigrants, the broken, the downtrodden, the oppressed, who came up from down south to find the American Dream, to find it in a hard day’s work and a fair wage, to find it 40 hours at a time, to find it in the satisfaction of being able to afford the very things that they built with their own two hands. They found it, and they thrived. They built a city, they built a culture, they built a state, rooted in that belief: that any man, born anywhere, could roll up his sleeves and get what was promised to him. This is the Only place where the American Dream was Real.

There are still murals in Detroit that show men – black and white – working hard, side by side, to build something. And it wasn’t just something they were building for others, for rich con-artists and carpetbaggers, but for themselves, for each other. That mural will never die. It is part of Detroit forever and ever. So is Joe Louis’ fist. You know the statue. It’s just a giant goddamn fist. That is Detroit. That is who we are.

And when World War II came around, what did we do? Detroit took all of its might, all of its knowhow, and built the machine that would win a goddamn World War. You want to thank someone for saving the world? You thank Detroit. You want to sit down on Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day or, yes, Thanksgiving, and give thanks to someone? You thank Detroit.

But money always talks, and the people who control the money always listen to it, and what they hear makes them just want more and more of it, and so people like the Dallas Cowboys came and took it from us. These rank hypocrites who wear the flag on their chest, who cry crocodile tears whenever a soldier is paraded through the streets, stole the very heart of that flag, pissed on the men and women who did the work that made it all possible. And so the American Dream broke, because in the end, that’s all it’s turned out to be: a Dream.

It’s a dream that’s been leveraged, used and abused by the Dallas Cowboys of the world, to get others to do their work for them and then reap all the benefits. These leeches have always been here. Hell, a Civil War was fought once upon a time over this shit. But these Spiritual Confederates, these traitors of the American Ideal, that thing we’re all taught growing up to believe in, never really went away. They just slinked in the dark until real people, working people, built something that they could take away again. And they did, and, well, welcome to the hellscape that is America in 2018.

It’s ironic that the very people who the Spiritual Confederates rely upon to prop them up are the people who they’ve been robbing blind all this time. It’s ironic, but it’s also kind of the point: the only reason these assholes are even allowed to exist is because not only have they robbed us all, but they’ve convinced us that it’s our fault, that we deserve it, that all of our hard work and sacrifice exists simply so that they can take it from us. They’ve conditioned us to believe that we’re inferior, that we don’t deserve our piece, that a man who breaks his back everyday doesn’t deserve anything more than minimum wage and then a layoff when even that becomes too inconvenient to the bottom line of these vultures. They’ve made us embarrassed to be who we are, and then have encouraged us to lash out against people who are just like us, hard working people who just want their piece of the Dream.

So when you ask “Why does Detroit get the Thanksgiving game?” that’s why. When you look at Detroit, and you sneer at its husk, you remember who you’re sneering at. You’re sneering at yourself. You’re sneering at the Heart and Soul of what America was supposed to be. You’re sneering at that Dream, at the very thing you were taught from birth to revere.

Detroit is a fragile thing these days. It’s been drawn back and drawn back until it exists as little more than a downtown area huddled by the river. It’s an idea more than anything else these days. And yet it’s an idea that people like me still want to believe in. I love Detroit not just because I have lived in Michigan all my life, but because it is the city of Dreams, because it is the city where once upon a time, those Dreams were Real, where America – the romantic myth that we all grow up believing in – was Real. I love Detroit because it’s tougher than you, because despite all its been through, it will still stand the fuck up and puff out its chest and tell all you bastards to go fuck yourselves. Nobody believes in Detroit, but goddammit, deep down, Detroit still believes in itself. It still believes in an Idea, in Possibility, in the heart and soul of a working man’s mural, in the giant fist of Joe Louis. That is MY Detroit, and I will love it forever.

It’s a hard thing, though, to know what you could be and to not really be able to do anything about it because the Spiritual Confederates, the Dallas Cowboys of the world, came along and took it all from you, left you with only that Attitude. We’re still Detroit and we always will be because it’s who we are, and that makes it extra painful when we can’t even afford the basics, when we have to choose between shit like getting clean water and fucking garbage service. It hurts when your football team, the same one that has been playing on Thanksgiving Day since Joe Louis was the Champ, can never get their shit together. It hurts to get up everyday knowing that all you need is a chance because you know who you are, you’ve proven it to the world already and they just forgot. It hurts to know that no one will give you a chance, that they’ll all just sneer and look down on you while they count the money that they forgot they stole from you in the first place. It hurts to know that these swine are out there believing that this is their country. It hurts to live in the most powerful country, the richest country, in the history of the world, a country that we built, and to be left out of it, treated like low class scum by those who stole it. It hurts. It all hurts. But what I want you to do is to stop and think. I want you to be thankful for everything you have this Thanksgiving, and while you’re thinking and giving thanks, I want you to thank God, to thank Detroit, that you get to have it all. You’ll never give us back what’s ours and that sucks, but goddammit, you will turn and you will look at us and you will say Thank You.

Thanksgiving is ours. It is our holiday. It belongs to us. And you will never take this away.

Lions 27 Bears 0