“This Thanksgiving we’re all in a very different circumstance: Things are a hell of a lot better,” President Joe Biden mused to reporters with The Washington Post in early November. Would anyone “as bad as things are, in terms of prices hurting families now, trade this Thanksgiving for last Thanksgiving?” he asked.
Since that time, the national media has been eaten up with stories about inflation, a fall uptick in COVID-19 cases, Biden’s dip in popularity, and other woe-is-us stories.
Yada, yada. That’s news as you drive it, folks. You know the crime rule of news: If it bleeds, it leads. And you probably instinctively also understand that you, as readers and web surfers, will feast your eyes and click a keyboard first on stories about your turkey costing more. Maybe later you’ll come back to peruse a report about the beautiful new East Lake Park or the new push to move the Tennessee Riverwalk from its current inland Southside location to the river’s edge along the old ADM property – now part of the upcoming community called The Bend.
The point here is that Biden is right: Nationally and locally, there should be few of us who would have traded this Thanksgiving for last Thanksgiving.
With no vaccines available last Thanksgiving, most of us huddled in our own homes and, at best, zoomed or Facetimed with our extended families. This year, despite the delta version of COVID, and with more than half of us in Hamilton County vaccinated (some even boosted), we gathered again. Imagine this year facing delta without vaccines.