On my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving Day, I am (sincerely) grateful and reflective for all the blessings received by my family, my friends, my work mates, my country, the world, and so on.
Operationally I am also very grateful to have finished the most ill-starred day of my memory, yesterday, in which I was: a participant in a car crash in Maryland in the morning (no one injured, to my surprise as I watched it all unfold in super slo-mo from the passenger seat); immediate observer of another crash in Florida late at night (miraculously no one injured, but this involved waiting for an hour at midnight on the shoulder of I-75 south of Ocala, to show the Florida Highway Patrol where the vehicle in question had come to rest, in the scrub brush, after hitting the left guard rail and then flying over other cars and off the road to the right); and managing a mid-flight electrical failure in a normally trusty small airplane in between. Surprisingly, no meteors struck the house after we went to sleep. The whole saga at some other point, because it was intellectually, culturally, and emotionally instructive. My wife and I, who made it via rented car, after the airplane was disabled, to join her mother and many other family members in southern Florida, are more than normally grateful and in a "this puts things in perspective" mood.
In the spirit of gratefulness, and before returning to other topics in a couple of days, let me give the podium back over to my friend Michael Jones. He appeared here a few days ago, in a role as a self-announced "0.1%-er" who said it was time for politicians and the public to recognize the human pain behind the protests of the "99%." He follows up, with the help of another reader, below. This post features an imagined presidential speech to address the concerns of the era. Among its other virtues is an ending that should be a model for future presidential rhetoric.