Don't Worry, Be Happy

We're still in a good place

I celebrate Thanksgiving 2024 feeling very fortunate to be living quite well in a great country surrounded by supportive communities responsive to my social, cultural and financial needs.

In response, I’m renewing my commitment to helping others here live in comparable comfort.

I’m saddened by friends overdosing on politics who seem to confuse a spell of political stormy weather with a fear – unjustified from my perspective –of political climate change.

Living in a democracy requires an acknowledgement both that the other side sometimes wins and that such opposition victories seldom result in irrevocable changes.

I find it interesting and provocative that two of the major issues we confront today result from efforts to provide a healthy economy to those who need it most.

Today’s inflation was apparently partly caused by our government’s decision to spend what it took to keep the economy buoyant and unemployment low in a successful, if imperfect, quest for the long-sought soft landing.

And today’s immigration stress partly reflects a welcoming generosity and a reluctance to turn people away from a country founded on immigration and to acknowledge that open borders that admit all are intolerable to the majority,

But yesterday’s responses – tolerating painful and inevitable depressions and nearly closing our borders – are no longer options.

To those who challenge my positive bias, I propose a thought experiment. Consider what would happen if all the countries of the world opened their borders to all comers. Which countries would lose population and which would gain?

My personal guess is that the small number of Trump-terrified progressives carrying out their threats to move to Western Europe or warmer climes would be totally overwhelmed by migration to the United States, a predisposition we already have ample evidence of.

We can, should and must continue to welcome newcomers from abroad, but need a more measured way to do so. Acknowledging such limits doesn’t imply nativism, a logic my recently-arrived friends from Central America and Afghanistan seem to accept more readily than some progressives whose families have been here for generations.

We appropriately continue to debate what a great country looks like and whether the United States is one, but it clearly is a good place to live now for a majority of us with an enduring potential to be better.

I like it here.