We Americans can create controversy and conflict about anything and everything.  The latest issue to raise our collective blood pressure is that major big-box retail stores are going to open on Thanksgiving Day. Wow! This has now become occasion for uproar, protest and yet another chance to demand an emotional, patriotic defense of our way of life.  After all, Thanksgiving is the greatest of all family American holidays when, by tradition, we are supposed to get together as a family, be happy and overeat. For some people, opening big retail stores on Thanksgiving Day surpasses Obamacare as the worst thing to happen in American history and a threat to our values (whatever they may be anymore). One women interviewed on a “news” program declared that in protest she will not shop on Thanksgiving and not even shop in those stores forever unless she required necessities. Huh? She implored everyone to join her in refusing to shop on Thanksgiving Day. Fat chance. All these people wringing their hands over the horror of big stores opening on Thanksgiving is a perfect example of how distorted our collective psyche has become.  We cherish some idea of great immutable American traditions, like Thanksgiving, as if they really mean something.  Then we find out that all our so called values are illusions and have been distorted to be money making machines (like Christmas by the way).  So, here is the reality.  Big stores are in business to make money and they care not about you or American traditions or how much they pay their employees who have to work on holidays or whether you shop there or not because others will and the loss of you doesn’t mean a damn thing.  By opening on Thanksgiving Day they make more money.  Period.  So if you are all in a snit about big stores opening on Thanksgiving Day, stay home.  It’s that simple.  Happy Thanksgiving!