Promised to try to keep politics out of holiday

Ah, Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday of them all.

As its name implies, it’s a day to give thanks for our many blessings. And for me, it’s family time up in the mountains, in a lodge we rent out every year for a long holiday weekend reunion.

This year, we’ll be grieving the loss of a loved one, celebrating the youngest among us, reconnecting as a family and going home exhausted from all the fun.

And then there’s politics. I’ve already been warned not to be bringing it up, and I said I’ll try. I’m not a bit happy with Trump’s election and the Republican takeover, that’s for sure, but I’m not going to let it ruin my favorite holiday. Instead, dammit, I’ll be thankful, and hope for a better tomorrow.

Hope goes well with giving thanks. Well enough, as a matter of fact, to top my list this year: I’m thankful that we still have hope.

Now, for an anti-Trumper such as myself, you’d think I would be hoping our new president will fail at what he says he’ll do, and yeah, I guess you’d be right. But I have a bigger hope than that: That the working men and women of this country will finally see through the propaganda being fed to us by a billionaire class more interested in serving themselves than the rest of us.

But that’s just me. Guess I should also be thankful that we live in a nation that allows us the freedom to oppose this hard turn to the right. I’d say most Americans, from both sides of the political divide, would agree that we all have the right to peacefully protest — and I hope they’ll remember that constitutional entitlement if the rights of the anti-Trumpers are ever placed on the chopping block.

I’m also thankful to see that, in this post-election period, people are reaching across that political divide in hopes of finding some way to better understand each other.

Search “political common ground” and you’ll see a plethora of media outlets, nonprofits, think tanks, universities and grassroots efforts calling for a movement toward a middle ground. One of my favorites is the “Do Unto Others” initiative, also known as the Kindness Campaign, being spread by churches around the nation.

NPR has launched a series called “Seeking Common Ground: Conversations Across the Divide” featuring stories about people and their efforts to reconcile our ideological and political differences. Which brings me to another offering of thanks: To the news media outlets that do their jobs with a commitment to truth over all else. NPR was one of them, as are a whole lot of newspapers and other independent and strong-willed news outlets.

There are still a lot of good and brave journalists out there who maintain fairness and accuracy in the reporting, and for them I am deeply appreciative. My hope is that they don’t come under attack by the new administration.

OK, so maybe it will be tough for me to keep my political mouth shut over Thanksgiving, but I promise I’ll try. That way, I will be better able to see my family for what we truly are — good people, loving people, far better than the politics that swirls around us.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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