For many Americans, this will be a melancholy Thanksgiving. But there is reason for hoping that brighter days lie ahead.
Like many families, we won't have our usual large gathering of family members and friends on what has always been my favorite holiday. Even before the government started warnings against large family get-togethers, I disinvited the usual collection of children, grandchildren and other friends. (It will, however, prevent the inevitable clash over President Donald Trump.)
Our family is among the lucky ones. We're all still around to mark this Thanksgiving, unlike the many Americans whom President-elect Joe Biden has often noted will have empty seats at their kitchen or dining room tables because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The entire holiday season threatens to be as grim as the grey winter skies during these days with ever shortening daylight hours. The short-term benefits of celebrating the holiday as usual seem hardly worth the potential long-term impact.
Still, there are some hopeful signs, as this dismal year of 2020 morphs into 2021, just five weeks away.
In recent weeks, three of the drug companies that have been rushing to perfect anti-COVID vaccines - Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca - have reported their clinical tests show a high degree of success and minimal side effects.
This means the first vaccinations will likely be available for hospital workers and other health professionals before the end of the year and for high-risk individuals throughout the population soon afterwards, assuming promises of an effective government distribution system are achieved.
Unfortunately, the degree to which Trump has sought to play politics with the entire issue has produced substantial public skepticism about the efficacy of the vaccines. Biden and his incoming team face a crucial sales job in persuading the public the vaccines are safe and can achieve the return to normalcy most Americans crave.
The president-elect's statement that he would take a government certified vaccine will help.
Meanwhile, the fact that Trump will soon leave the White House - once his heavy-handed efforts to forestall the inevitable are past - is another reason for renewed hope. While he was not to blame for the onset of the novel coronavirus, he was responsible for the inept way the federal government managed the nation's worst health crisis in a century. From the outset, he refused to show the necessary leadership like the wartime president he claimed to be.
And though his administration deserves credit for the speed with which Operation Warp Speed has produced the necessary vaccines, he all too often put the goals of reopening the economy and declaring victory ahead of demanding the difficult steps that were needed to protect Americans and make possible those goals.
Merely changing presidents won't end the threat. But it will ensure the effort has the leadership of a president who will approach that task in the consistently serious, substantive way that has been lacking and will listen to the experts whose advice has been often ignored.
Finally, beyond the immediate issues of the virus and its devastating impact, the decision by a majority of voters to terminate Trump's presidency means an end to the most concerted threat to the nation's basic democratic institutions since the Civil War ended more than 150 years ago.
As Republican Sen. Mitt Romney recently noted, "It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President" than Trump's post-election maneuvers to overthrow the election verdict of the American people.
Whatever Biden's ultimate successes or failures - and he'll likely have both - his inauguration will mean we once more have a president who respects the basic tenets of American democracy: the will of the people, the separation of powers, the independent judiciary, and the free press.
That alone is a reason for thanksgiving on this otherwise grim renewal of this most American of all holidays.
The Dallas Morning News