I’m Not Canceling Thanksgiving (and a Few Words of Appreciation)

Short version: I’m gonna take a few days off, if anything BIG comes up I’ll break my silence and post a column. (Photo from WKRP’s Turkey Drop episode)

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I am grateful this year for Thanksgiving. I spent much of the last two years being fed through a tube, following successful cancer surgery and four unsuccessful reconstruction surgeries of my larynx. A lot of surgeons would have given up; Dr. Kolb didn’t.

I left the hospital at the beginning of August and endured six weeks of painful recovery. The only days I missed writing were those following surgery and only then because I was doped up, adrift in a chemical fog, and had tubes coming out of me everywhere, making typing anything more than a text a challenge.    

I’m happy to say that I’m back to “normal.”  Real food, no matter how humble, tastes wonderful.

Every day is a miracle as I walk a little further, feel a little less stiff, and lose a little bit more of the fear of a setback.                                                                                                                                   

Thank you to YOU. I started Words & Deeds as an independent blog following the better part of a decade writing about political issues for the San Diego Free Press. Last year, I shifted the underlying platform from a stand-alone website to a newsletter format less likely to have readers who randomly pop in based on search engine queries.

The change has worked out better than I expected. Five hundred or so subscribers are driving the reach of my musings, sharing stories that interest them on email and social media. In the run up to the midterms, thousands of unique visitors stopped by on many days. 

I realize these aren’t Big League numbers. It’s much more satisfying to me that readers actually care and share. Your encouragement and feedback is worth more than an insane number of passers-by forgetting what was said here by the next time a message pops up about whatever stokes their dopamine. 

Looking over my list of followers I can see lots of names of humans who want a better world and are willing to put in the effort to make it happen. As we head into the new year I expect to expand the horizons of this bulletin, heading into as yet unexplored topics along with more frequent guest posts.

Bellyaching about “Critical Thanksgiving Theory” is the type of crap I expect to see from the right in days to come [perhaps starting with an ahistorical and factually challenged op ed in the New York Times]. 

Being unable to acknowledge the full scope of our past experiences represents the affirmation of a desire to see a future that repeats those mistakes. Yes, there was greatness in our past in addition to horrible events; history is not just colonizing “uncharted lands” by white Europeans. Nor is it advancement of the public welfare by the charitable acts of monopolists. 

Our stories should include things like correctly attributing the parts of our constitution to the native people who utilized basic forms of democracy. The struggles of non-heroes are also historically important, as are the mistaken paths followed by significant parts of the population.

While I’m not going to turn Words & Deeds into a history seminar, context including past events and experiences is important to me, so expect to see more of that type of research.

See you next week.

Doug P.