Each year I try to watch this great video of the legendary William S. Burroughs reading his poem “Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986″, and think about how I would update it. The poem is taken from the collection Tornado Alley and the video above was directed by Gus Van Sant, who had cast Burroughs as a drug-addled priest in his 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy. The video for me seems especially prescient this year and if could make my own 2011 Thanksgiving day prayers they’d go something like this:
To all the bullies who torture the queer kids so much that they decide to kill themselves.
To the people who don’t protect them from evil, because they find talking about sexuality uncomfortable, and think homosexuality is a sin anyway of course.
To all the killers of transgendered people, helping to make normal what’s gone so very wrong in society.
To the American policemen, who have been enjoying their Christmas early, giving their gifts of violence, pepper-spraying peaceful protests, kicking pregnant women in the stomach. Good Job NYPD and Mayor Bloomberg! I am thankful for you!
To corporations gleefully fracking and putting chemicals into our drinking water, and to a pipeline that would destroy our environment as we know it, to the uncleaned oil in the Gulf. You deserve our thanks.
To the American government, who’ll inevitably fail to care for the millions of shell-shocked PTSD suffering veterans who went off to fight in two unjust wars,
To corporations and goverments killing net neutrality and being able to monitor everything we do. Thank you! We want you to like us and watch us and keep us from what we want. And please keep creating new devices that push us father and farther away from being able to interact with each other on a personal level. U got it? 
Okay that’s it. Feel free to add your own in the comments below.
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