Like most of you, we will be gathering soon for Thanksgiving. Like many of you I will be giving thanks for a very loving, decent family. All good things in my life have sprung from my wife’s decision to tie our lives together. I have been enormously blessed.
I will also thank the Lord that I have not been cursed with a job that required me to live in the White House – in these perilous times that job is too hard for any human being. The world is falling apart and everyone seems to want to come to America – both a complement and a curse. We can’t do it and we can’t stop it and we care about the people too.
We demonstrate and work for peace but much of the world sees war as the only solution. We don’t want other countries to be able to overrun peaceful people, and we see our own security in respect for each other’s borders, especially those who are friendly toward us, but the only way to prevent it requires weapons – in the Philippines, Taiwan, Ukraine, the countries of the European Union, and, somehow, to end wars in the Middle East too. America’s fascination with guns brings that contradiction home.
We work for prosperity, fight for the homeless and against food insecurity, but inflation threatens when too many people have jobs that could provide homes and food.
We want people to have jobs, homes, food, and we want to respect what buildings and services each community wants to allow for itself. We want more people doing things for us – nurses, doctors, hospital staff, police, pilots, teachers, preschools with teachers and staff, psychologists and psychiatrists helping to keep us safe and well as comfortable, farm laborers to keep us fed sustainably and cheaply, but we don’t want to let anyone cross our borders to do that work. Bless the president for taking on those contradictions.
We want to protect our children and grandchildren and our fellow Americans in the path of floods and fires from global warming but want someone else to bear the price. We want to bless the oil and the coal companies and we want to shut them down.
While no human being can handle it all without error, I recognize Joe Biden’s patriotism and that he has been devoting every bit of his strength, energy, and experience to the welfare of the American people despite all our contradictions. I pray that the Lord may grant him good health and the strength to persevere, the wisdom and skill to strengthen America and make our lives better, and, if it is not too much, Lord, to ask that he may be able to bring us together.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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