With the nation frayed around the edges over the economy and bitter political divisions, this year’s Thanksgiving is the most important in a long while. We’ll get to that.
Giving thanks is something many Americans do daily over dinner. The spontaneous annual offering of thanks to the deity began here in 1620. The Pilgrims were supposed to be in Virginia, but ill winds dumped them in what became Massachusetts.
The initial appreciation was focused principally on just being alive to step off the Mayflower, a 100-foot-long, three-masted British cargo boat that would become a regular ferry to North America.
Several false starts with the Speedwell, a companion vessel that leaked and turned back, pushed the historic voyage into a 66-day ordeal bouncing across the North Atlantic amid its annual autumn storms.
When the Mayflower sailed, it had 102 passengers as cargo, all confined in just 1,400 square feet on the gun deck. The families survived on hardtack biscuits, dried meat, and flat beer. For 66 days.
The ship rolled constantly. There was continuous seasickness. Other odors. And cold. No heat. No baths. And no bathrooms. For 66 days.
One man died en route. But Oceanus Hopkins was born. And then came Peregrine White. Hopkins died in childhood, but White lived to 83 in the New World.
Like much of that new land’s ensuing history, the first unpromising year was filled with hardship, suffering, infighting, and death.
So, when the first harvest was completed in 1621, the 52 surviving Pilgrims held a real Thanksgiving with wild turkey and duck. About 90 members of the Wampanoag Tribe dropped by with venison, and the event turned into America’s first long holiday weekend. There was singing, dancing, ball games, of course, and too much eating.
Exactly 160 years ago today, the 16th president and first Republican gave a two-minute speech that endures still. In that same year, 1863, Abraham Lincoln, bless his Yankee heart, made official the idea of a November Thanksgiving holiday. And we’ve been following that declaration ever since.
Even during the deadliest conflict in U.S. history, about the time of the Battle of Gettysburg’s 51,000 casualties, the year after his beloved 11-year-old son Will died of typhoid fever, and just 17 months before his own death, Abraham Lincoln found reasons for giving thanks.
Can we do any less?
What Americans are experiencing these days is a painful, tumultuous chapter full of bitterness, division, anger, intolerance, pettiness, unwillingness to listen or understand, an absence of leadership, poor adult behavior, and, above all, fear. Profound fear.
It is a perfect (hopefully passing) storm of adversity lacking only a war. So far.
I have been asked if this is the worst period I’ve known. My answer is always No.
The 1960s had all of the above, plus an actual war, urban riots, domestic bombings, and political assassinations.
What these current times have is a deep lack of historical perspective and sentient leadership. Most modern presidents, but not the last three, have had sobering military experience. That doesn’t guarantee strong leadership, but it does provide a tempered, firsthand personal perspective on the gravity of issues at hand, especially foreign, and what’s at stake.
Every day, Joe Biden sets a new record for oldest president in office. He turns 81 this week.
Actually, it’s not the age itself that should disqualify him from office. It’s what those nearly 30,000 days of life have done to his body and mind that wasn’t all that sharp, to begin with.
Henry Kissinger is in the 101st year of his life (35,240 days), and he’s still analyzing world events with clarity and cogency.
Twenty years younger, Joe Biden can’t find his own way off a stage.
Sympathetic media can hide many things. But not all.
Never mind the unfolding scandals and 40 percent of his term spent on vacation where no one can see or document his activities, visitors, or possibly treatments.
Joe Biden’s gaffes, falls, snoozes, mental freezes, incoherent rambles, his inexplicable yelling then whispering, and that creepy vacant stare that grasps his face at times have become quite disturbing to the public. Such that an overwhelming majority of voters, even Democrats, agree he’s too old to be commander in chief with access to the nuclear launch codes.
Joe Biden wants to remain president until Jan. 20, 2029.
Donald Trump is “only” 77. He wants to be president again, also until 2029, when he’d be 82.
Many of Trump’s economic, strategic, and social policies as president were effective and popular, so effective and popular that Joe Biden has devoted much of his short work weeks to undoing them, one by one, starting with energy independence.
Honestly, what defeated Trump in 2020 was his personal behavior. He hadn’t changed. He still hasn’t. His hardcore loyalists love it. They can pack rallies. But they are not enough to elect a president.
What was new and promising in 2015-16 – the brash confidence, the refreshing candor, the simplistic but plausible solutions – by 2020 had become boorish, arrogant, narcissistic.
His mistreatment of people, while certainly not unprecedented, nor disqualifying among chief executives, has been serially documented, even by allies.
The access he gave to media, often several times a day, was welcome and enlightening. It was also self-serving, enabling him to dominate news cycles, sometimes to his own disadvantage.
But the instances of pugnacious, even juvenile behavior mounted. The constant confrontations over every perceived slight often seemed counterproductive, self-destructive, and unnecessary.
Why not, for instance, just give the National Archives the classified documents he had inappropriately removed when leaving office, as other politicians have done with no legal consequences?
Now comes word from the Trump camp that instead of a thorough and badly-needed housecleaning of the Department of Justice in a potential second term, Trump has vowed revenge on the Deep State people and departments that have clearly persecuted, as well as prosecuted him.
That might momentarily please his most fervent supporters (and himself) but would only perpetuate the country's deep divisions and the clear problem of a dual justice system. And provide new evidence to feed the aspiring dictator narrative.
Chasing Trump are two much younger Republican heavyweights with impressive conservative governing records – Nikki Haley, 51, and Ron DeSantis, 45.
They’ve impressed in debates. But eight weeks out from the first GOP primary voting in Iowa, neither has succeeded in denting Trump’s substantial polling leads.
No heavyweight alternative to the president has challenged Democrat Biden, although Joe Manchin has hinted at a third-party bid that could damage him, as the campaign of independent Robert Kennedy Jr. also could.
So, who with qualifications will lead us?
Polls and our own intuitive guts tell us neither presidential front-runner is desirable. But both major political parties are caught in a drug haze, unable to control elected members or enlist new, smarter ones.
The House of Representatives has become a clown car, with new leaders emerging every few days, then getting quickly knocked down by ambitious colleagues. Then complaining to the playground monitor about being pushed.
Democrats there argue over who can caution Israel the most and thereby support Hamas the soonest.
Nikki Haley calls the Senate “the most privileged nursing home in the country.” She’s right. But they have a fancier clown car.
Without Mitch McConnell, the wily GOP leader there, the conservative Supreme Court would not exist. But the 81-year-old has twice now been struck mute before cameras.
Both chambers stage their Kabuki brinksmanship over fiscal budgets and the national debt limit. The needless drama is useful only for party fundraising.
Everyone knows they’ll work something out, but the predictable confrontations keep media employed. And the rest of us perpetually anxious.
It’s not like Congress has a shortage of serious issues to address – the slowing economy, a crumbling education system producing graduates inept at math, reading, and even writing cursive.
We’re supporting proxies in two active wars that could, maybe, who knows, involve us further.
The current befuddled president boasts of a successful record and economy that no one else sees or calls him on. He says inflation is declining, which is true some months and enables media to lead cheers.
However, the accumulated price increases from the last 34 months of his inflation stubbornly remain in place while wages stagnate, costing families billions in dollars and sleepless nights.
Looking back on those interminable months of clumsiness, so many of Joe Biden’s actions seem purposely destructive. Who would print $5 trillion in new money knowing what that would ignite? Who in these times would intentionally destroy a nation’s energy independence? And drain the nation's emergency oil reserves without refilling?
And who, with the best interests of the United States in mind, would effectively dissolve an international border, allowing in just 1,000 days more than 8.2 million illegal, undocumented aliens to stream across and penetrate the nation’s society with incalculable social and education costs to come? Joe Biden offers four more years of this.
If something like death or more tumbles incapacitate him, Biden’s political backup is Vice President Giggles, who talks like a beginning readers book but couldn’t lead a September PTA meeting.
This week's annual holiday has always been my favorite. And my family’s Canadian heritage gave us a second Thanksgiving in October.
This holiday doesn’t celebrate some dusty, dead patriot who wore a white wig. But it renews its relevance in the present every year. It arrives without all the financial and emotional buildup and baggage — and subsequent fallout — of December’s expensive holidays.
As countless millions of families travel to hug and gather while sharing a meal on the eve of Black Friday, it reminds us to stop worrying about all the other stuff.
And at least for one day, or maybe even four like the Pilgrims, be thankful individually and collectively for those people with us past and present and this troubled but amazing place in this time.
Let’s look at all this upsetting national turmoil from a positive point of view. If you bring up politics with sufficient stridency at the Thanksgiving table, you’ll surely ignite loud, perhaps even bitter arguments.
Think of it as productive strife, turning the minus of our national anxieties into a personal plus. Then, you can calculate all the money you’re saving on Christmas gifts.
You’re welcome.
