Still so much to be thankful for. I hope the day finds you surrounded by loved ones, in good health and determined spirits to fight for what is just and ethically demanded. I am grateful for you, my critical readers and friends, a community that sustains me and each other in hard times. Grateful for nature and the arts. Grateful for younger generations undeterred in their activism for a better world.

Grateful for reminders that surrounding darkness cannot always extinguish a central light.

Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter yesterday reminded us:

“(in 1864…) Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”

In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front for a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.

And in 1865, at least, they won.”

And always grateful for music!

Regular YDPs will resume when I am back home by the end of next week.