~a column by Colleen O’Brien
It is two weeks after the general election, and lo and behold, it’s Thanksgiving; happens every four years.
Every four years some of us get to be thankful. The rest of us look on in consternation — not a lot of thankfulness going on — because our candidate didn’t make it. It’s such a pendulum, this thankfulness business when it comes to politics.
If I were more Zen-like (embracing in equal measure both the truth seekers and the liars of life) and less whatever I am — liberal? political? idealistic? — would my life work better?
It’s Thanksgiving, and I’m edgy. Really, all I want is to be thankful.
So let’s count the ways, Colleen.
No matter what some folks have been saying for the last 18 months, I understand and can be thankful that we remain the strongest economy on the planet; and we are point blank the richest (or maybe it’s just that we have the most rich guys? whatever). My opinion is that we have too many way-over-the-range-of-sense wealthy people (our president-elect is one of them) and too many way-under-the-range-of-sense poor. (Many voted for him; but not all. His rival has two and three-quarter million more of the popular vote than him and the counting isn’t finished.) But we remain healthy and strong, independent and creative despite opinions to the contrary, so I am thankful.
Under this new administration I understand that the new administrator promised to fix our vast disparity of wealth and income. Thank the Bern that he’s even talking about it. So either there’s a thankful piece of business right around the corner regarding some kind of tax fix that will spread the wealth. Or not. Let’s hear a tweet about it, at least, to know where we stand.
I would like to be thankful to know what’s a lie and what isn’t, but there’s a three-card monty game going on all the time now from the Tower, so I’m never sure what’s what. Is he lying? Are the fact checkers lying? Is NBC lying? Is “Saturday Night Live” lying? Is the whole country now prevaricating? Are kids denying that they’re stealing cookies out of the jar, overjoyed and shouting, “Gee, Mom, the President lies!”
After all the buttonhook jobs left the scene, a shoelace industry popped up. Then came slips-ons (loafers), then Velcro — all start-ups to help our economy. We foreigners who wandered here, were transported here or fled to this part of the globe seem to be a vigorous bunch: we keep inventing things, coming up with new ideas, new ways to keep our shoes on our feet.
I am thankful that going backward to old industries has never been a big problem in this country.
We’ve learned over the years to jump on all the at-first weird, strange, loud, dangerous and stinky new ways to get us from the home place to the general store and the moon — horses, trains, bicycles, automobiles, motor scooters, roller skates, airplanes, Segues and rockets. I think robotic cars run on air might be the next job opportunity. I look forward to being thankful when the new straw boss jumps on that rather than the rickety coal wagon.
We were moving along in a thankfully climatic way, albeit some of us kicking and screaming like two-year-olds who have to eat the spinach because it’s good for us; until we got the word from the new On High that he’ll be reviving the coal industry, one of the dirtiest of energies; and he’ll approve fracking and shaling, the most disruptive ways of extracting a fossil energy product. Some of the adults on the planet are teaching us that we really will be better off with restrictions on fossil fuels. We may survive if we discard old ways that foul that lovely blue sky of ours. Many of us are accepting that we do need to cease polluting our planet. But, alas, we are not the new ones leading the country: The new boss’s new head of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), Myron Bell, thinks that the subject of climate change is “silly.” Or is this just a tease about a rash appointment to make us tremble at his twitters?
An oilman in Texas recently told an NPR reporter that he has no truck with the EPA telling him what to do, but that the big wind turbine he built next to his oil rigs was just common sense in a windy place like El Paso or Austin or wherever he is in that vast and breezy state. Sometimes it’s just how one figures out the information for himself as opposed to being told what to do. This is something to be thankful for on Turkey Day, the 24th of November, 2016, that one Texan figured it out for himself.
This particular Texan is now getting free energy from the wind and selling the excess energy to whatever his local equivalent of Alliant is. He’ll be bragging to his neighbors about the subsidy he got from the Feds to build that big windmill (which goes along with the subsidy he gets for drilling oil). I am thankful that wind entrepreneurs in Greene County have helped make Iowa among the top three in wind energy in the country. Texas, the oil state, is right up there producing energy from that unending renewable called wind. Iowa and California are the other two. I’ll be thanking the day the newest Poobah reads about the money in alternative energies.
Thankfulness also has to go to the people in small towns and big who open a business; they are the percentage of shops of one kind or another (retail, automotive, service) in this country that amounts to 99.7 percent (according to the U.S. Small Business Advocacy of the U.S. government) of new businesses who hire 500 or fewer employees. They export 98 percent of the goods that leave the U.S. There are more than 28 million of them across the nation. We know our share of them in this county — they are responsible for 67 percent of the people who work here. Thank you.
We have much to be thankful for, living as we do in a country that can do this entrepreneur thing even as people are fibbing to us that we’re going to become a Third World country because China, who turns out shoddy steel among a gazillion other shoddy things, is taking all of our jobs. I am thankful at how innovative we are and always have been.
I have a job and Social Security (not a gift, never an entitlement, but a savings I and my employers over the years paid real money into), which is definitely a security to me…and to everyone of my age. The new guy elected says he’s okay with SS as it is. But he’s chosen as vice-president an old white-haired fellow who has a long congressional record of voting consistently against a secure old age. Not our friend if we’re aging. Which would be all of us.
I am still thankful this Thanksgiving: I have my family, I have my friends, I have my Social. This is now a mantra, for the moment.
The other guy won the game; so we didn’t have to have an NRA event or a promised arrest of the other contender like happens in Third World countries ruled by an angry poor loser (who even when winning bullied the press that showed his three chins*). In my present confusion and trepidation, I remain over-the-moon thankful for that — that my candidate didn’t win and have to face a false prosecution, or worse, for winning.
Happy Thankful Day to you!
*Surely the richest leader in the world has enuff money to pay for a chin lift so he doesn’t have to whine about bad photos of himself in a newspaper. For heaven’s sake.
