Robert, I just love how you, Heather, Joyce, Tom C. and several others are bringing together people who have become family, based upon shared values and commitment. This is what I am most greatful for this year.
Perhaps it is the hope that you provide us, or at least the calmness. Thank you and have a very pleasant Thanksgiving.
double ditto. you (Robert), Heather, Joyce, Tom C., Simon, and Robert Reich are whom i read on a daily basis. Some others periodically, but this list is daily. I feel less alone because you all are community for me, even tho you don't know me! and I am grateful.
Thanks to you both for your wisdom, your positivity, and your encouragement to keep moving forward throughout the good, the bad, and the ugly. I am grateful for my family and my deceased best friend’s children who consider me their surrogate grandmother to one of their kids. He just turned 5 months old! I want to actually thank Substack for providing us a partnership, a community, in which we share our ideas after reading your columns. I am also thankful that Congress is looking more diversified, like the rest of the country. May you both have a simply wonderful holiday!
Like all of us in your extended family, I am very grateful and thankful for you and Jill and the goodness, wisdom, perspective and hope you share with us. Thank you, thank you. And, if I may, would you further gift us all with a transcript of your taped remarks this evening? I very much hope to be able to broadly share them. Again, thank you…….and happy Thanksgiving!
I share gratitude for enrichment from these communities of Robert, Heather, Joyce, and others, as well as deep appreciation for the peacefully poignant photographs created by a certain photographer in coastal Maine, as periodically posted by Heather! Thank you!
Thank you, Jill and Robert, for this wonderful video! Besides being grateful for a relatively conflict-free life overall, and being a member of the various substack communities like this one, I am particularly grateful today for having my kitty back from an overnight stay in the hospital. He was there for a life-threatening condition that so far he has been able to overcome. Sounds silly, I know, but that is my focus for Thanksgiving 2023!
Hoping you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving today, however you see fit to celebrate it!
Dear Lynell, sending warmest wishes for a Happy Thanksgiving and for your precious kitty to make a full recovery. Animal people are the best people. And loving our pets is anything but silly.
Animals have always been my best and most reliable friends. Lynell, I hope your dear cat makes a complete recovery. These four-legged creatures bring such joy into our lives. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your loved ones.
Save for my husband (I have to say that in case he reads this!), I, too, look to my animals as best and reliable friends! So yes, Janet, joy abounds when a four-legged creature - or more - is part of your life.
It doesn't sound silly at all to me. Our four legged family members give us a lot of love, which makes them very important in our lives. I hope your kitty remains in good health!
Thanks, Jill and Robert, for your kind and reassuring words, and for hosting this wonderful community. The impact you have is immeasurable.
This year, my wife and I decided to spend Thanksgiving with our oldest son and his family in southern Japan. At 5 and 2-1/2, our grandsons had never experienced it. My wife packed up some cranberry sauce, Stovetop Stuffing, decorations and a few other items. and challenged our son to find something like a turkey (a Costco chicken sufficed), and some mashed potatoes, and we had our feast.
We are thankful for all we have, and the opportunities we've been given, and to live in the greatest country in the world at the greatest time in its existence. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to leave it better than we found it. I need only to look into the eyes of my grandchildren to realize how important that really is.
~ “We owe it to our children and grandchildren to leave it better than we found it. I need only to look into the eyes of my grandchildren to realize how important that really is.”
I am grateful that I tuned into your newsletter just before I was going to sleep and received yours and Jill’s heartwarming message. Your perspective is ALWAYS a tonic for me, and I sleep better after reading it. I watch too much MSNBC and it gets to me. I am grateful to be a part of this great Experiment, and this community. Peace and love to all 💕
Awe another reason to appreciate you Robert and Jill. Yes a little buddhist thinking can help us through this time, as it has for so long. A great reminder and I am grateful to you for this. Your words this morning give me some ease. Thank you.
I am so thankful to you both for your generosity of connection. Both of your offerings give me more ease & headspace to be in my world with my people! May the awesome gift of increased calm and a lighter load through community uplift ripple back to you and yours!❤️
The great American experiment—and being comfortable with uncertainty.
It seems as though we are living through a moment of great uncertainty. That uncertainty is causing anxiety—anxiety that is aggravated because many commentators proclaim that the future of our democracy hinges on the next election. I heard a commentator say exactly that on MSNBC this evening.
It is true that the future of our democracy hangs in the balance in the next election. But that it is always true.
Uncertainty defines us as a nation because we are attempting something great and wonderful that can endure only through the constant vigilance of its people.
Uncertainty was present at the moment of our nation’s birth—and persists through the present moment. Therefore, we must become comfortable with uncertainty.
Benjamin Franklin, 81-year-old at the conclusion of the Constitutional convention in 1787.
Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?
Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The ink was not yet dry on the signatures of the delegates to the constitutional convention and Benjamin Franklin was framing the future of our nation as a constant struggle to “keep”—that is, to defend—the democracy that had just been brought to life by the Constitution.
Just two years later, George Washington—then our first president-- described America as the “last great experiment” for promoting human happiness."
Washington’s use of the word “experiment” was deliberate. In the age of enlightenment, an “experiment” was an effort to “test” a proposition. Here, the proposition that Washington was referring to was whether a government of the people could succeed in delivering the fruits of liberty. But it was an experiment. It was a test. Washington recognized that it might succeed, but it might not.
Seventy years later, Lincoln found himself leading a nation that was being tested exactly as Washington had said. At Gettysburg, Lincoln said that the American experiment was founded on the proposition that “that all men are created equal” and that the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Uncertainty is in our nation’s DNA.
• Franklin – A republic, if you can keep it.
• Washington—a great experiment
• Lincoln—said the Civil War was testing whether a nation devoted to equality could endure—or whether it would perish from the face of the earth.
And though we survived the Civil War, the tests never ended.
We were tested by 70 years of post-Civil War resistance to equal rights,
We were tested by the rise of the KKK,
We were tested by segregation approved by the US Supreme Court,
We were tested by American elites supporting Hitler on the eve of WWII
We were tested by McCarthyism,
We were tested by isolationism preceding two world wars,
We were tested by the battle for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, human rights;
We were tested by the assasinations of John Kennedy.
We were tested by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
We were tested by the cold war, the Vietnam War, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan,
We were tested by Watergate, 9/11, 2016, 2020, January 6.
And we survived. We endured. We prevailed.
And, now, we are being tested by uncertainty going into 2024.
Yes, the future is uncertain. It always is. So let’s be comfortable with uncertainty and direct our energy into focusing on solutions. . . . as we have done every year since1787, when Benjamin Franklin said the framers gave us a republic if we can keep it. We have kept it for 234 years . . . and we have every reason to believe we can keep it for the next generation. 2023 teeaches us that we have every reason to be hopeful, but no reason to be complacent.
I wish you a happy and blessed thanksgiving with family and friends.
Oh, my goodness. Ask and ye shall receive. This gentleman will indeed be reading your comments to his 37 guests gathered ‘round to share Thanksgiving blessings. The rich warmth and full gratitude expressed in the comments has no need to be replicated here other than to say I echo it all. And so wonderful to see your smiles. I remember in the early days of the newsletter, wondering what you looked like! I’m chuckling as I say that. You two have evolved to such a level of presence, online and in the world, in the realms of the printed word, the audio versions, the videos from Jill et al, meetings, meetups and seminars… In 2017 it’s likely you would not have predicted where you (and we… and the nation, even the world!) are. Thank you for this transcript, so eloquently uplifting and informative, and thank you for all you do for so many. The solidarity and unity toward “keeping it” Is of an importance that cannot be overstated. And to think Mr. Franklin was 81! I’ve been known to say that “God is up there laughing” on occasions, while in truth, He is all around, beyond and within, the saturation of ubiquitousness.
Warm Thanksgiving wishes to everyone here, and certainly to all in your household as you celebrate this Thanksgiving together (and we know “what that looks like” now due to “Everyday with Jill”). It’s a privilege, a comfort, and a blessed gift to be part of the family that is the community of this newsletter, and the broader expanse of Substack offerings. Indeed we are blessed. Thank you for so much. Happy Thanksgiving ~ Kathie ‘n’ Johnny
Brilliant. Heartbreaking in a positive way. I’m sure I was not the only one to shed tears. Saving this one especially (actually, I save all yours and Heather’s) to listen to whenever I find myself googling “how to become an ex-pat.”
Thank you. Peace and ease of well-being, Friends..
Thanks for this, Robert. It took me a very long time to clearly perceive the uncertainty of our country's fate, probably because the first and only US History class I had did not mention it, and partly because I wanted certainty. I bought a house as soon as I could, a duplex so that I could rent part of it out. I've paid cash for all of the four cars I've owned--around $1,000 inflation adjusted for the first one, a then 8 year old '77 Toyota Corolla with 91k on the clock, which I bought from one of the (then future) Iraq weapons inspectors, and around $23k inflation adjusted for the only one I bought new--the second.
The current era--I'm not sure what to call it, and I don't want to give it the name of the former guy, is forcing me to face uncertainty, and you are helping me reach that goal--which I'm grateful for, as I realize that one is better off facing what exists, than imagining that things are as one would want.
Thank you so much, Robert. I will be reading this many times (and sharing with friends) to remind me what we as a country have been through and survived. A wonderful timeline. I appreciate your upbeat words that give me hope for the future.
In addition to the appreciations expressed here by others, I am particularly grateful for Robert's promotions and support of the Tending to Democracy Giving Circle. We, meaning YOU--the wonderful readers who donated and raised $22,000 as part of the total $4.3 MILLION raised by The States Project Giving Circles for the Democratic candidates in the Virginia state legislature races on Nov. 7--and WON!!! Virginia state Senate retained, and House flipped!
Like Robert's mantra, "We have every reason to be hopeful, but no reason to be complacent." Early Impact 2024 campaign is up and running!
I just learned that the race in district 82 Virginia is separated by 78 votes, republican leading. Kimberly Pope Adams has asked for a recount which is scheduled to begin Dec 5th. I assume she will need financial help for that.
I am grateful for your work and to be a part of the community you have developed, which is a wider community since many of us also participate in other Substack communities with a cross pollination of ideas. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.
Robert, I just love how you, Heather, Joyce, Tom C. and several others are bringing together people who have become family, based upon shared values and commitment. This is what I am most greatful for this year.
Perhaps it is the hope that you provide us, or at least the calmness. Thank you and have a very pleasant Thanksgiving.
I agree, and would add, the sense of safe community.
Well said! My community includes all the people you mention as well as Simon Rosenberg and his Hopium Chronicles.
Thank you for putting that into words. It is exactly how I feel.
double ditto. you (Robert), Heather, Joyce, Tom C., Simon, and Robert Reich are whom i read on a daily basis. Some others periodically, but this list is daily. I feel less alone because you all are community for me, even tho you don't know me! and I am grateful.
Thanks to you both for your wisdom, your positivity, and your encouragement to keep moving forward throughout the good, the bad, and the ugly. I am grateful for my family and my deceased best friend’s children who consider me their surrogate grandmother to one of their kids. He just turned 5 months old! I want to actually thank Substack for providing us a partnership, a community, in which we share our ideas after reading your columns. I am also thankful that Congress is looking more diversified, like the rest of the country. May you both have a simply wonderful holiday!
Like all of us in your extended family, I am very grateful and thankful for you and Jill and the goodness, wisdom, perspective and hope you share with us. Thank you, thank you. And, if I may, would you further gift us all with a transcript of your taped remarks this evening? I very much hope to be able to broadly share them. Again, thank you…….and happy Thanksgiving!
I share gratitude for enrichment from these communities of Robert, Heather, Joyce, and others, as well as deep appreciation for the peacefully poignant photographs created by a certain photographer in coastal Maine, as periodically posted by Heather! Thank you!
Both Amen and thank you Ellie❣️
Yes, Ellie, we have gained so much from everyone we follow on Substack. Wishing you and your family a pleasant holiday.
Thank you, Jill and Robert, for this wonderful video! Besides being grateful for a relatively conflict-free life overall, and being a member of the various substack communities like this one, I am particularly grateful today for having my kitty back from an overnight stay in the hospital. He was there for a life-threatening condition that so far he has been able to overcome. Sounds silly, I know, but that is my focus for Thanksgiving 2023!
Hoping you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving today, however you see fit to celebrate it!
Dear Lynell, sending warmest wishes for a Happy Thanksgiving and for your precious kitty to make a full recovery. Animal people are the best people. And loving our pets is anything but silly.
Thanks, Still. That's the way I see it!
Oh, Lynell, I hold you and your sweet kitty in my ❤️. I sincerely hope your Thanksgiving is peaceful and that your little one recovers.
So far so good, Marlene! Thanks for being in our corner today.
Not even remotely silly! I'm so glad that your kitty is home with you.
Thank you so much, Jenn!
Animals have always been my best and most reliable friends. Lynell, I hope your dear cat makes a complete recovery. These four-legged creatures bring such joy into our lives. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your loved ones.
Save for my husband (I have to say that in case he reads this!), I, too, look to my animals as best and reliable friends! So yes, Janet, joy abounds when a four-legged creature - or more - is part of your life.
Happy Thanksgiving to you, too!
Same to you, Lynell. And I’m sure your husband will understand. 😊
It doesn't sound silly at all to me. Our four legged family members give us a lot of love, which makes them very important in our lives. I hope your kitty remains in good health!
Many thanks, David. I agree with you 100%. So far so good for my kitty!
May it remain so for your kitty for its high normal lifespan!
This is a wonderful newsletter! Happy Thanksgiving to you, Jill and your family.
I rely on your daily clarity, wisdom and compassion and no matter the uncertainty, I'm
looking forward to our shared future.
Jennifer, I'm guessing you're Robert's daughter possibly? If so, couldn't be more grateful to him and your mom!
Thanks, Jill and Robert, for your kind and reassuring words, and for hosting this wonderful community. The impact you have is immeasurable.
This year, my wife and I decided to spend Thanksgiving with our oldest son and his family in southern Japan. At 5 and 2-1/2, our grandsons had never experienced it. My wife packed up some cranberry sauce, Stovetop Stuffing, decorations and a few other items. and challenged our son to find something like a turkey (a Costco chicken sufficed), and some mashed potatoes, and we had our feast.
We are thankful for all we have, and the opportunities we've been given, and to live in the greatest country in the world at the greatest time in its existence. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to leave it better than we found it. I need only to look into the eyes of my grandchildren to realize how important that really is.
~ “We owe it to our children and grandchildren to leave it better than we found it. I need only to look into the eyes of my grandchildren to realize how important that really is.”
How lovely, Bob.
Happy Thanksgiving back at you two childhood sweethearts. :-)
You both are amazing. Thanks for being beacons of light and reason…and continually encouraging pragmatic optimism. Blessings to all ❤️
I am grateful for your wisdom and advocacy, I am grateful for this community, I am grateful for every day of world peace.
I am grateful that I tuned into your newsletter just before I was going to sleep and received yours and Jill’s heartwarming message. Your perspective is ALWAYS a tonic for me, and I sleep better after reading it. I watch too much MSNBC and it gets to me. I am grateful to be a part of this great Experiment, and this community. Peace and love to all 💕
Dear Robert and Jill,
What a treat to see your smiling faces! And to hear your reminders of how we have, and will, make it through whatever comes.
You are a truly gifted writer: I learn something every day from you, and I feel the deep mental satisfaction that clear writing always brings.
I am thankful for you and for this community of intelligent, thoughtful, well-informed people. Warmest wishes to everyone for a beautiful day 🙏💖.
Awe another reason to appreciate you Robert and Jill. Yes a little buddhist thinking can help us through this time, as it has for so long. A great reminder and I am grateful to you for this. Your words this morning give me some ease. Thank you.
I am so thankful to you both for your generosity of connection. Both of your offerings give me more ease & headspace to be in my world with my people! May the awesome gift of increased calm and a lighter load through community uplift ripple back to you and yours!❤️
Do you have a printed version of your wonderful video? I want to read it to our family of 37 at our Thanksgiving dinner.
The great American experiment—and being comfortable with uncertainty.
It seems as though we are living through a moment of great uncertainty. That uncertainty is causing anxiety—anxiety that is aggravated because many commentators proclaim that the future of our democracy hinges on the next election. I heard a commentator say exactly that on MSNBC this evening.
It is true that the future of our democracy hangs in the balance in the next election. But that it is always true.
Uncertainty defines us as a nation because we are attempting something great and wonderful that can endure only through the constant vigilance of its people.
Uncertainty was present at the moment of our nation’s birth—and persists through the present moment. Therefore, we must become comfortable with uncertainty.
Benjamin Franklin, 81-year-old at the conclusion of the Constitutional convention in 1787.
Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?
Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The ink was not yet dry on the signatures of the delegates to the constitutional convention and Benjamin Franklin was framing the future of our nation as a constant struggle to “keep”—that is, to defend—the democracy that had just been brought to life by the Constitution.
Just two years later, George Washington—then our first president-- described America as the “last great experiment” for promoting human happiness."
Washington’s use of the word “experiment” was deliberate. In the age of enlightenment, an “experiment” was an effort to “test” a proposition. Here, the proposition that Washington was referring to was whether a government of the people could succeed in delivering the fruits of liberty. But it was an experiment. It was a test. Washington recognized that it might succeed, but it might not.
Seventy years later, Lincoln found himself leading a nation that was being tested exactly as Washington had said. At Gettysburg, Lincoln said that the American experiment was founded on the proposition that “that all men are created equal” and that the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Uncertainty is in our nation’s DNA.
• Franklin – A republic, if you can keep it.
• Washington—a great experiment
• Lincoln—said the Civil War was testing whether a nation devoted to equality could endure—or whether it would perish from the face of the earth.
And though we survived the Civil War, the tests never ended.
We were tested by 70 years of post-Civil War resistance to equal rights,
We were tested by the rise of the KKK,
We were tested by segregation approved by the US Supreme Court,
We were tested by American elites supporting Hitler on the eve of WWII
We were tested by McCarthyism,
We were tested by isolationism preceding two world wars,
We were tested by the battle for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, human rights;
We were tested by the assasinations of John Kennedy.
We were tested by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
We were tested by the cold war, the Vietnam War, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan,
We were tested by Watergate, 9/11, 2016, 2020, January 6.
And we survived. We endured. We prevailed.
And, now, we are being tested by uncertainty going into 2024.
Yes, the future is uncertain. It always is. So let’s be comfortable with uncertainty and direct our energy into focusing on solutions. . . . as we have done every year since1787, when Benjamin Franklin said the framers gave us a republic if we can keep it. We have kept it for 234 years . . . and we have every reason to believe we can keep it for the next generation. 2023 teeaches us that we have every reason to be hopeful, but no reason to be complacent.
I wish you a happy and blessed thanksgiving with family and friends.
Oh, my goodness. Ask and ye shall receive. This gentleman will indeed be reading your comments to his 37 guests gathered ‘round to share Thanksgiving blessings. The rich warmth and full gratitude expressed in the comments has no need to be replicated here other than to say I echo it all. And so wonderful to see your smiles. I remember in the early days of the newsletter, wondering what you looked like! I’m chuckling as I say that. You two have evolved to such a level of presence, online and in the world, in the realms of the printed word, the audio versions, the videos from Jill et al, meetings, meetups and seminars… In 2017 it’s likely you would not have predicted where you (and we… and the nation, even the world!) are. Thank you for this transcript, so eloquently uplifting and informative, and thank you for all you do for so many. The solidarity and unity toward “keeping it” Is of an importance that cannot be overstated. And to think Mr. Franklin was 81! I’ve been known to say that “God is up there laughing” on occasions, while in truth, He is all around, beyond and within, the saturation of ubiquitousness.
Warm Thanksgiving wishes to everyone here, and certainly to all in your household as you celebrate this Thanksgiving together (and we know “what that looks like” now due to “Everyday with Jill”). It’s a privilege, a comfort, and a blessed gift to be part of the family that is the community of this newsletter, and the broader expanse of Substack offerings. Indeed we are blessed. Thank you for so much. Happy Thanksgiving ~ Kathie ‘n’ Johnny
Brilliant. Heartbreaking in a positive way. I’m sure I was not the only one to shed tears. Saving this one especially (actually, I save all yours and Heather’s) to listen to whenever I find myself googling “how to become an ex-pat.”
Thank you. Peace and ease of well-being, Friends..
Thanks for this, Robert. It took me a very long time to clearly perceive the uncertainty of our country's fate, probably because the first and only US History class I had did not mention it, and partly because I wanted certainty. I bought a house as soon as I could, a duplex so that I could rent part of it out. I've paid cash for all of the four cars I've owned--around $1,000 inflation adjusted for the first one, a then 8 year old '77 Toyota Corolla with 91k on the clock, which I bought from one of the (then future) Iraq weapons inspectors, and around $23k inflation adjusted for the only one I bought new--the second.
The current era--I'm not sure what to call it, and I don't want to give it the name of the former guy, is forcing me to face uncertainty, and you are helping me reach that goal--which I'm grateful for, as I realize that one is better off facing what exists, than imagining that things are as one would want.
Me too.
See comment above; i have replied with the text I used as a guide to my comments.
Thank you, Robert and Jill.
May this great experiment carry us forward and help us make a better world for friends and family. Happy Thanksgiving and thank you both.
Thank you so much, Robert. I will be reading this many times (and sharing with friends) to remind me what we as a country have been through and survived. A wonderful timeline. I appreciate your upbeat words that give me hope for the future.
In addition to the appreciations expressed here by others, I am particularly grateful for Robert's promotions and support of the Tending to Democracy Giving Circle. We, meaning YOU--the wonderful readers who donated and raised $22,000 as part of the total $4.3 MILLION raised by The States Project Giving Circles for the Democratic candidates in the Virginia state legislature races on Nov. 7--and WON!!! Virginia state Senate retained, and House flipped!
Like Robert's mantra, "We have every reason to be hopeful, but no reason to be complacent." Early Impact 2024 campaign is up and running!
https://www.grapevine.org/giving-circle/1XQhnyD/-
I just learned that the race in district 82 Virginia is separated by 78 votes, republican leading. Kimberly Pope Adams has asked for a recount which is scheduled to begin Dec 5th. I assume she will need financial help for that.
I am grateful for your work and to be a part of the community you have developed, which is a wider community since many of us also participate in other Substack communities with a cross pollination of ideas. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.