Giving Thanks Despite Worries

As you read this, over 53 million Americans, 13 percent more than last year, will be wending their way home from celebrating a holiday established by Abraham Lincoln to give thanks for a major victory over the forces seeking to preserve the institution of slavery in the United States. He could not have known that 158 years later the nation’s children would be taught that America was founded not in 1776 to establish a more perfect union guaranteeing a range of individual freedoms, but in 1619, and that the founders’ goal was to preserve slavery. Or that San Francisco would remove his name from a high school.

Pricier Gasoline Did Not Deter Travel

Most Americans took to the road, 95 percent in gasoline-powered vehicles, while millions of masked Americans, clutching proof of vaccination, poured into the nation’s airports, creating 20 million screenings for the Transport Security Administration over the ten-day period beginning the Friday before Thanksgiving. Travel was well up on last year, but still somewhat below pre-pandemic levels.

Some hit the road merely to take a break from the workplaces they once called home. Most, unable to Zoom the aroma of roasted turkey, opted for the in-person family reunions postponed since China included the Covid virus among its many exports to the United States. About two-thirds said their celebrations would mimic those in the good old days before masks, shots, lockdowns and anti-vaxxers were part of their vocabularies, but half asked guests to provide proof of vaccination, suggesting that happy days are not quite here again. Especially since the cost of a traditional at-home dinner was up 14 percent on last year.

The Slaughter Of The Turkeys

The highlight was the traditional turkey dinner, despite the fact that it cost 14 percent more to put on than last year and environmentalists’ complaints that family gatherings have high carbon footprints. Some 46 million turkeys were consumed, although none by the 3 percent of Americans who consider themselves vegans. President Biden, taking time off from recreating America in the image of a European welfare state, pardoned two turkeys, Peanut Butter and Jelly, deploying perhaps the only Presidential power not requiring congressional or court approval.

Many gave thanks in their churches, synagogues and other houses of worship, others worshipped at the temple of the National Football league, which regaled them with three games, lasting perhaps 10 hour (3 hours and 12 minutes each), and providing a total of 54 minutes of action (18 per game).

Spend And Spend

Then, Black Friday, so named when it was the day on which crazed bargain-hunters stormed stores and turned the red ink on retailers’ ledgers to black, but it has been quieter since Internet shopping took hold and shortages reduced retailers’ propensity to discount. Early estimates from Mastercard SpendingPulse put retail sales up 12 percent over 2020. Store sales are up 40 percent and online sales 5 percent, the latter after an 85 percent jump last year. Remember that part of these increases is attributable to the 6.2 percent rate at which inflation is increasing sales totals – and wiping out the value of recent wage increases.

Savings- and credit-rich consumers seemed willing to accept substitutes for items entombed on vessels lolling off the coast of California, although empty store shelves, which Americans associate with the defunct Soviet Union and socialist countries such as Cuba and Venezuela, come as a shock in a country in which capitalism has always produced an almost infinite range of choices.

“Xi Virus” Really The Source Of New Ills

It may well be that for many shoppers, locked in with kids, dogs and edgy spouses for some eighteen months, it was the thrill of getting out to hunt as much as the foray’s result that counted. It does not seem that many were induced to join the million who had shopped at home in response to news that a new strain of the Covid virus had made its appearance in the south of Africa. Investors were not quite so calm. Unfortunately, in naming the new virus the powers-that-be chose to skip a letter in the classical Greek alphabet and proceed directly to Omicron. Had they stayed with the proper order, we would be discussing the devastating effect of Xi on the world’s economy. “Xi was not used because it is a common last name,” Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesman told The New York Times.

The Food Was Great, The News Not So Much

Americans who chose to catch a bit of news between games would have been wiser not to. Having toured the wreckage of a Nieman Marcus store in Arizona after it was looted during a “protest”, I found looting of the chain’s Los Angeles store, as well as the invasion of San Francisco’s Nordstrom by 80 thugs brandishing crowbars and wearing masks unsettling, especially since a Black Lives Matter organizer in Chicago called similar incidents “reparations”.

And with a wife who found a gun in her back at a New York ATM, I was more than a little sensitive to reports of rising murder rates in New York, Chicago and other cities. Some blamed that mayhem on calls to defund the police, others on insufficiently restrictive gun-control laws.

Add to the mix a culture war that has Americans uneasy. Religious institutions are being forced to obey rules that violate the consciences of their followers, or, as others contend, attempting to impede the onward march of the gender revolution, while millions of illegal immigrants, plausibly believing themselves to be welcomed by President Biden, are crossing the border, many handed bus tickets to American cities of their choice.

Discontented Americans

Little wonder that polls (the Real Clear Politics average) show 63 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, up from around 50 percent only six months ago, and that the President’s approval rating stands at 41.3 percent, down from 55.5 percent when he was inaugurated. And that 56 percent of young Americans and 64 percent of older folks believe, or say they do, that their children will be worse off than they are.

This, before gloom was deepened by the announcement of a new Covid variant, first identified in Botswana, making an appearance in South Africa. Rattled investors dumped shares into a sinking market.

Biden Marches On

Biden, preparing to pour about $4 trillion into an economy that can’t meet the demands already made upon it, continues marching forward into the past in his pursuit of history’s vacant plinth next to that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

Yet people vote with their feet. Despite all their discontents, few if any Americans are headed for other countries, while millions of foreigners seek entry to a land they see as one of hope, opportunity, and freedom. And Americans by the tens of millions chose last week to give thanks. As we say in New York, “Go figure.”