It’s time for Thanksgiving and, well, to be thankful.
To listen to the news and how the vast majority of us talk about life, things aren’t great.
The economy is in trouble, even when things are going well for so many.
The national deficit and debt continue to increase astronomically, even when the supposed guardians of fiscal responsibility, the Republicans, who historically complain about the excesses of government, had control of the federal purse strings. They’ve mortgaged our future, and the Republicans continue to do it even as Washington, D.C., is obsessed with throwing out their leader – or protecting him, depending on which side you’re on.
We have political parties at each other’s throats. The recent impeachment hearings have smacked more of political posturing – on the part of both parties – than actual fact-gathering.
Nicotine vaping is supposedly destroying our children, though we’ve obviously forgotten how bad actual tobacco was for them. We also ignore the fact that mind-altering marijuana and alcohol continue to get a pass despite much larger use among teens and 4,700 deaths per year linked to the use of alcohol among teens.
The Middle East is a quagmire that even President Trump, thus far the least warmongering presidential figure of either party in the past 30 years, cannot escape.
The globe is warming, and there’s apparently no turning back as the world turns hellish.
Yep, there are some terrible things that can make us uncomfortable.
Closer to home, our crime rate bumped upward by about 25 percent from 2017 to 2018, and it’s all thanks to theft. Everyone knows someone who got ripped off. Our local grocery stores constantly deal with it.
We see more vagrancy, more homeless on the streets than we used to here in Sweet Home.
People get sick and die. People lose their jobs and their houses, and sometimes, it’s not their fault.
Life can be miserable.
Even when we should be happy.
That list above won’t get much bigger. It’ll change. Some things will remain in a different form, but no one will care about or think much about President Trump and impeachment if a Democratic president elected in 2024 finds her doom in a House of Representatives restored to Republican control in 2026 as it investigates whatever abuse of power catches someone’s attention.
The Democrats will cry about the witch hunt and claim it’s all political. As an aside, impeachment was expected to be political. It says so in the Federalist Papers, No. 65.
We’ll find out the climate is really going to doom us in 2041 instead of 2030.
Medicare benefits will be cut because no one paid attention now, and Social Security will be cut in another 10 years.
The Asian countries that contribute most of the Pacific Ocean plastic will get that under control, but China’s economy will collapse, while we start freaking out over trade deficits with Korea and Vietnam.
Of course, we don’t really know if that’s how things will shape up. It’ll be something like that filling the headlines and news channels. We’ll obsess endlessly over all the terrible things the other side does, and nothing will really change.
Tired already? So are we.
And here’s the point: The other list, the good things in life, will get even longer than it is today.
It is far, far longer than the one above.
In fact, without most of the great things in our lives, all of those terrible things could never happen.
Plastic makes our lives better. Without it, we would still be living the 19th century’s American dream, wearing oilskins in the rain.
We can instantly know about all the terrible things our political opponents are doing thanks to the Internet and 24/7 broadcast news coverage. We instantly find out they’re rotten and corrupt. What do we expect? They’re politicians and it’s the same situation that existed before the Internet.
One look at any newspaper prior to the 20th century will demonstrate this clearly demonstrates how vitriolic our politics can be.
One party once won it all. During the Era of Good Feelings, the Federalist Party collapsed, but that didn’t stop the surviving party, the Democratic-Republicans, from quickly splitting.
We get sick and die, but generally speaking, more of us do it much later in life thanks to advancements in hygiene and medicine.
While challenging, climate change won’t end the world any more than the famines predicted by Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s in the “Population Bomb” for the 1970s and 1980s. Actually, climate change offers us the fabled Northwest Passage, and it could open up the resources of Greenland to the world. Rising sea levels cause problems we need to solve, but they also offer benefits.
Our modern society allows us to obsess over things like this, to argue every little inch of a topic. Our modern technology gives us the time and the means to do it, time and means we wouldn’t have if we lived in another age in which just trying to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves was a full-time occupation.
This same technology keeps us entertained, warm in the winter, cold in the summer and fed. It keeps us healthier than ever. It keeps us safer than we’ve ever been. We’ve never been so unlikely to be the victim of random violence – terrorism or getting shot up by a six-shooter on a dusty street.
Here in Sweet Home, our crime rate shot up last year, but it’s still about 28 percent lower than it was in 2014. And right now, it’s less than half of what it was in the early 1990s.
We had a smoke-free summer.
We have engaged people who are planning cool events that we can all participate in and maybe get the opportunity to know and appreciate others around us. The upcoming Christmas celebration is a really good example.
We have a nice new City Hall, with an art gallery featuring work by talented people who many of us didn’t even know existed.
We still have beautiful rivers, lakes, mountains, forests and a lot of things we take for granted that other people spend big bucks to go on vacation to see – and take photos of with their high-tech cellphones to post instantly to all their friends. We don’t do that because we live here.
As we go to Thanksgiving dinners and luxuriate in our modern amenities, let us remember and be thankful for those modern amenities that make life so amazing.
So amazing, in fact, that they constantly improve the means by which we complain about our modern lives, lives that would be the envy of nearly anyone living prior to the 20th century. Especially here in Sweet Home.