What are we thankful for this year?

by philg

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

What are we thankful for this year? Let’s leave out the obvious “family and friends being healthy” (partly because it is obvious and partly because our media assures us that family and friends were mostly killed in 2020 due to a combination of Covid-19 and Donald Trump).

Here are a few from me…

  • the mostly intact general aviation infrastructure in the U.S. We may not have anywhere to go (and various governors’ travel orders may actually make it illegal or impractical to go anywhere), but very likely there will be an awesome airport near our destination with a helpful FBO
  • the Swedes, for showing the world that a society of humans can have priorities other than avoiding Covid-19 (a bit of credit in this category as well to Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, who also deserves credit for telling people that politicians and bureaucrats cannot protect them from a virus)
  • service industry workers, coming into work despite coronapanic and for wages that are often about the same as collecting welfare (and always lower than collecting child support, with proper planning)
  • dogs, whose value to humanity has gone way up now that humans have given up on most purely human goals and activities

Readers: Now it is your turn! (via the comments)

Related:

  • “Is There a TERF at Your Thanksgiving Gathering?”: Toxic relatives come in many forms: the Trump supporter, the devil’s advocate, the COVID-19 denier. There’s also the TERF: the trans-exclusionary radical feminist. TERFs are transphobes who wrongly believe transgender women are not women … But the reality is that trans women are women…
  • Best Facebook sentiment: “Happy Thanksgiving to all our friends and family! Fewer people to cook for this year but no fewer to be thankful for!” (from a Swiss immigrant who now does every American thing better than most Americans)

15 thoughts on “What are we thankful for this year?”

  1. Thankful to live in a small town, where social distancing isn’t a huge challenge. Even during the high summer season, we locals sorta know how to navigate, e.g., hit the bike trails late afternoon on weekdays only; avoid the Boardwalk except if there’s been a thunderstorm recently which sent the day trippers fleeing toward home. (This is near to Biden $2.7M vacation home in North Shores, Rehoboth Beach.). Grateful for US medical care which a few times in my life or that of one of my family members has intervened in helpful, and occasionally life-saving ways.
    Grateful to be cooking Ann Landers’ pecan pie recipe (still reading ingredients/directions from file card which was typed up on a Smith-Corona back in the 1980s). Pure vanilla extract from Madagascar, in this interconnected world of ours, is a must!

    Bonne fête à tous! (thankful to Philip for teaching me to press down on key/keyboard to pull up the accents some years ago, as I was incapable of figuring that out on my own)

  2. Happy Thanksgiving!

    I’m thankful for this blog, its readers, and most especially our host, for allowing me to reply to myself, compose posts that are non sequitur expositions of tangential topics, and generally vent my spleen on a plethora of subjects which I may know very little about, but find myself deeply concerned with nevertheless. You’re a little, private island of sanity, Philip, and we need more people like you in this world.

    Thankful for my family, because without their support in the past six to eight months my life would have been rendered immeasurably worse and more difficult than it is, due to some ailments of a fairly serious nature.

    Thankful to the handful of health care professionals who have done their best during this pandemic to provide expert care regarding the aforementioned, including breaking a couple of rules and going out of their way. They know who they are.

    Thankful that there may still exist a slim majority of Americans who believe in freedom and liberty, and recognize how important it is for all of us to restrain the Leviathan. I hope they can continue to do what they must to preserve our Republic, against all the forces and ideologies arrayed against and attacking it from within and without.

    The “things I am not thankful for” list would be much longer, so everyone should be thankful I won’t list them here today. Insofar as I wish to address them, I’m thankful to YouTube and the Police for the following song:

  3. I’m thankful for people. Those rare occasions when I meet people in real life are, surprisingly, rather precious. Social distance makes the heart grow fonder. People, such a lovely break from computers!

  5. I’m grateful for this blog’s commenter Alex, who along with others witnesses to the continued existence of mental activity here in the U.S. Alex, take care of yourself and cherish being alive despite all adverse circumstances!

  6. I am grateful that prayers get answered. I am grateful for indoor plumbing. I am grateful for my wife and children.

    Philg, thanks for running this online soup kitchen. We’d be virtually starving without you.

  8. Other day I was thinking it a bit odd AOPA and such have not weighed in on traveling restrictions. Guessing they think being quiet will get them eaten last, but since when is an advocacy group supposed to stay quiet. When only non ADS-B equipped airplanes can fly across state lines the joke will be on AOPA for supporting ADS-B mandates. Even the dimmest pilots should have caught on by now to what the third letter in ADS-B means.

  9. Thanks, philg, for the blog and its followers. Looking forward to January 20, when I can quit being “the other Donald”. I may even try to make Oshkosh if it happens in 2021.
    Pandemic report: my granddaughter’s British Airways flight from JFK to Heathrow last night had FIVE passengers. When that happened back in my airline days, we said “There’s more of us than there is of them.”

  10. Thanks to philg for this blog & allowing folks to comment without censoring 🙂
    also, shout out to regular commentators on the blog such as Alex!

  12. I am thankful to Pavel who has interfered in our election and finally got a Canadian to be president! We can only guess what the menace from the North’s plans are for Calgary Ted Cruz!

  13. I am thankful for the USA. With all of it flaws, it is still the greatest nation to live in.

    I am thankful to our government who for the lockdown, the so many orders and scares about COVID-19, whiteout them, we could have all been dead by now and cannot participate on this blog.

    I am thankful to our government for handing out freebees in so many ways and creating so many government jobs, without them, the elective officers would not have jobs.

    I am thankful to our protesters for protesting against all things you can think of, even when their protest is pointless and they have no idea how easy they have it compared to other nations, without them, the USA could end up being far worse than a 3rd world country.

    I am thankful to our so many small groups of “my cause is what matters” that want to impose their ideas and ideology on everyone, even when they are the 0.01% of the population, without them, the USA would not have a clear concise and we could wipe each other out before COVID-19 can.

  14. I am thankful for those who realize that the entire Rona uproar is a hoax, that masks and lockdowns have no effect on health, and that the overall death rate has not changed over the past year.

    (More Covid = Fewer heart attacks)
    https://www.sott.net/article/444898-Johns-Hopkins-University-Reveals-Manipulated-Covid-Death-Figures

    https://thefatemperor.com/published-papers-and-data-on-lockdown-weak-efficacy-and-lockdown-huge-harms/

    Yes, You May Have A Happy Thanksgiving: Coronavirus Update XLI – William M. Briggs
    https://wmbriggs.com/post/33626/

    Take Your Masks Off: That’s What THE Science Says – William M. Briggs
    https://wmbriggs.com/post/32326/

    Happy Thanksgiving!

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