A Happy Thanksgiving to All Our Readers!

On behalf of our entire staff at Hot Air, Townhall Media, and Salem Media, we wish all of our readers a happy and blessed Thanksgiving! We hope that you enjoy the fellowship and warmth of family and friends, gathered around whatever feast you choose to celebrate the day. 

Since today is a day for taking stock of our blessings, let me express my thanks for having all of you as part of our own community. All of us appreciate you so much. 

This has not been an easy year for us, as you all know. We lost two of our team this year, Karen Townsend and Jazz Shaw, both good friends and trusted colleagues to all of us. Rather than lament their absence, though, I’d rather celebrate their presence among us for the years we were lucky to have them and their fellowship with us. We can lift a glass of our preferred beverages today to toast both Karen and Jazz and pray for their families and friends as well. 

I wanted to offer readers a reflection today as well as a greeting, and looked at our archives to see what we had already written on previous Thanksgivings. Lo and behold, Jazz’ post from 2019 popped up immediately, and it seems fitting to cede the floor to a friend I dearly miss — and I know you do as well. 

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We have a plethora of things to be grateful for. No matter your personal situation, the one thing we are all still entitled to is hope. Hope for the future and the chance that events will deliver a result that works out in the end. Personally, I’ve faced some dark times in the past and endured a number of struggles. Most of you have as well. If not, I congratulate you on your lucky circumstances.

In the past, the country has faced dark times aplenty. This dates back to the uncertainty of our future as a nation through the revolution and the War of 1812. My grandparents were all born during the turn of the 20th century and lived through the great depression. My parents weathered the trials of World War 2 and lived to see the “Happy Days” of the fifties. We rise and fall and rise again, always somehow finding a way to muddle through.

But what keeps us all together as a society isn’t the people we elect to high office in Washington. The internet has ruined much of this, but the real world outside of our doors is what has made America a resilient, dominant force. We find happiness in our interactions with the people who keep us sane in an increasingly twisted world, even if we disagree with them on topics of the day. Blood remains thicker than water, but we also find communion with those who fill our lives in our own communities and we still retain the ability to select our old friends if not our family members.

The great experiment that is America only works as long as we are more than the sum of our parts. And America has always been that. We can disagree without being disagreeable, as my friend and mentor Ed Morrissey has often said. And nothing going on in the political circus today changes that. Participate in our grand democratic experiment, but more to the point, participate in your families and social circles and ensure that the next generation has the chance to realize that their parents were probably not as dumb as we thought they were.

I’ll close with an excerpt from a poem from Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Whether you are liberal or conservative, some wisdom may be found here.

We walk on starry fields of white
And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
We rarely offer praises.
We sigh for some supreme delight
To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
Of pleasures sweet and tender.

Our cares are bold and push their way
Upon our thought and feeling.
They hang about us all the day,
Our time from pleasure stealing.
So unobtrusive many a joy
We pass by and forget it,
But worry strives to own our lives
And conquers if we let it.

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May the Lord bless your day today, and all of the days that follow.

Ed

The front-page image is “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” by Jennie A. Brownscombe, 1914. On display at the Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal in The Netherlands. Via Wikimedia Commons.