Pretty and I have so much to be thankful for this year I plan to do a Very Thankful Thanksgiving post in the next few days – complete with pictures of our six weeks old baby granddaughter. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday between Halloween and New Year’s Day because the traditions of family times and places on that holiday linger in my memories alongside my hopes for the promises of a new year.
However, I also have much for which I am not thankful as the year comes to a close. I live in a polarized country that now has the weight of an impeachment process in the Congress, the “almost third” such process (I saw Nixon resign and walk away with his now famous V sign in 1974) in my lifetime. Nixon. Clinton. And now Trump. The public hearings that began this week gave the American people a better understanding of a president who apparently serves at and for his own pleasure. This is not a pretty picture, and as Wanda Sykes likes to say when she makes fun of white people and our free-floating guilt, it makes me sad.
As if the impeachment process weren’t enough to make me less thankful, I find the more compelling news articles in 2019 weren’t articles of impeachment but those regarding the creation of detention centers along the southern borders of my home state ofTexas and other states to accommodate the thousands of Latino refugees seeking asylum from persecution in their own countries.
An image forever etched in my brain is of Salvadoran Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande River from Mexico to safety in the United States in June of 2019. Their story is only one of many who made the treacherous journey to the US only to find – not freedom – but incarceration in a detention system run by for-profit companies that are often more interested in what they are paid than the people in their care.
According to The Guardian.com the number of persons living in detention centers throughout the United States totals 52,722 as of September 10, 2019. Unbelievable.
On our way home from babysitting our grandbaby tonight, Pretty asked me to please stop being so negative about the football coach, the football team, the rainy weather, the cold weather, politics, the president and whatever else we were talking about. Evidently I had a pre-Thanksgiving meltdown right there in the car. She told me my passionate outpourings made her more worried and raised her anxiety level. When I asked her whether she didn’t share my thoughts, she said she did indeed about almost everything I’d brought up but she preferred keeping her opinions to herself and offered a suggestion to me that I do the same. I told her I felt less anxious if I spoke up and shared my worries with her.
Hm. Maybe I should limit my negative opinions to my blogs. Now there’s an idea Pretty will support.
Stay tuned for my Very Thankful Thanksgiving post.
I'll Call It Like I See It 