Kate Cohen

Heather Long

Theodore R. Johnson

Molly Roberts

Dana Milbank

Shadi Hamid

Amanda Ripley

Alexandra Petri

Charles Lane

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As many head off for Thanksgiving after a disorienting month, our columnists tried to find anything in the world to be grateful for.

Searching for gratitude

Charles Lane:	This is impromptu with, "Washington Post Opinions. "I'm Charles Lane." This week we're bringing you something a little bit different, as many of us are getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving and come together with our friends and family over a big meal and conversation. We gave our columnists an assignment. After a trying month for many people, what in this world, in the news and politics and our lives are you grateful for? I'll be honest, it was not an easy assignment. Not everybody could find something positive to say right now, but a solid group of my colleagues did find some hope in the headlines.

Kate Cohen:	Hi. This is Kate Cohen. I live in New York, but I'm in Virginia for the holiday. This year, I am grateful for one of the first times maybe for tradition. I don't really like the idea of tradition. It makes me very suspicious when someone says, "Well, that's the way we've always done it." That doesn't seem like a good reason to do anything. This year, I have to admit that I sort of love the way that tradition can act as an autopilot that flies you in the right direction when you yourself, aren't necessarily capable of it. Every year, my family, my parents, sisters and husbands and all our kids, we gather at my parents' house in Virginia, and we've done this for decades. And every year I have wanted to do this. I didn't just do it because I did it the year before. I've been excited to be with everyone and cook for everyone. But this year I seriously was not in the mood. I didn't want to I don't know, be with people I didn't want to talk about politics, and I definitely didn't feel like celebrating. So we left for my parents' house the weekend before Thanksgiving because that's what we always do. Tradition pushed me against my wishes, against my immediate wishes, into the minivan and down I81. Tradition brought me to my parents' house, to my parents. Tradition says, "It's the fourth Thursday in November. Okay, now feel gratitude." And the funny thing is, it's working. I will. I do.

Tether Long:	I'm Columnist Tether Long. This time of year always makes me think of that cheesy movie "Love Actually", and that opening scene in the airport where people are hugging each other and Hugh Grant says something like, whenever I get gloomy about the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. Well, I don't personally hang out at the airport that often. When I get gloomy, I sometimes open my laptop or phone, and I type in, global poverty rates. The latest read is just under 10%. That's still too high, but it's pretty incredible when you think it was around 25% of the world's population living in extreme poverty when "Love" actually came out in 2003. And if you go back even further, 70% of the world's population was considered living in poverty as recently as the 1890s. What all this means to me is we've made incredible progress in helping people in the most basic part of being human, wanting to survive, wanting to have enough to eat. And if you look around the world, there's just been tremendous progress not just in China and India and Southeast Asia, but in Brazil and Mexico and Nigeria and Kenya. There's a great project where a photographer from Scandinavia has been going around the world, taking pictures of middle class families, you know, what's considered middle class in different countries. And almost every photo, even in some of the poorest countries, shows a family, you know, with a roof over their head, with a toothbrush and with a cell phone. It may not be a smartphone, it may not be electric toothbrush, but it just shows you how similar experiences are becoming around the world. I was in an Uber recently, and the driver from Bangladesh, when he heard that I do economics at the Post, he said, asked if I knew the Nobel Prize winner Mohammad Yunus, who was the founder of Grameen Bank that did all those micro loans and giving small loans to people. He told me that family and friends of his had personally benefited from this model. It's a reminder that all of these small initiatives globally have resulted in hundreds of millions of people living better lives. So while I might not be hugging people at the airport, I'm going to think about the progress that we've made, and I hope the global poverty rate goes to zero in my lifetime.

Theodore Ted Johnson:	I'm Theodore Ted Johnson, and one of the things I'm most thankful for this Thanksgiving is in a nation as large and diverse and polarized as ours is, we were still able to hold free and fair elections at the local, state and federal level. It hasn't always been that way. This is the end product of many, many years of people who were excluded from democracy, demanding access to it. And it's the product of a nation that has abided by the outcomes of election results. I don't take these things for granted. I'm especially grateful and thankful for them, given our nation's history. We have excluded more people from the franchise than we have included, and the battle to be part of this democracy is something that even those who were denied it never gave up on. It's an optimism they carried with them that allowed the elections we see today, the democracy we have today to exist. And thankful for the folks that came before us that made it all possible.

Molly Roberts:	This is Molly Roberts, and I'm thinking about how a lost election, especially a total loss, where the popular vote doesn't even go your pick's way, can be isolating. Do that many people really feel like this? What am I missing? [music] So I'm grateful for the communities at every level of my life that show me I'm very far from alone. That starts unsurprisingly, at home. At the Thanksgiving table, politics aside, visits from relatives across the country are comforting reminders that closeness is about more than geography, additional evidence for this truth, the Internet, for all its flaws, the misinformation, the misogyny, the more general misanthropy that appears in hateful posts or harassing comments, all of which Elon Musk's thrums with daily still has an almost incredible ability to bring people together. I'm thinking about how easy it was to track down the best Raman and Osaka on my trip to Japan via a collection of noodle enthusiasts on Reddit or to meet up in Tokyo with a high school friend I hadn't seen in years. I'm thinking of the people my mother in her toast in my wedding called my shadowy International cabal of video game friends, none of whom, because they are admittedly far flung, I would ever have met without transatlantic fiber optic cables and discord. I'm thinking of how the last "Exodus from Twitter now X has made BlueSky, " an alternative app the most vibrant it has ever been. A place to tell jokes and make memes without encountering AI generated ads every fourth Post or visiting the boot farm every time you look at your mentions, but also a place to have serious conversations. Is it an echo chamber? Sometimes, sure. But other very important times, it's not. Back to that lost election on "BlueSky" and across the Internet and on phone calls and podcasts and workplaces and even maybe at a few Thanksgiving tables, Democrats are having a spirited, sorely needed and plenty controversial conversation about how to rebuild a winning coalition. The best kinds of communities tolerate dissent and trust in good faith. It makes you, well, me feel a little better about losing to know not just that so many others were knocked down, too, but that we're working together to get up again.

Dana Milbank:	This is Dana Milbank. After the disastrous election, I'm more grateful than ever for the escape that nature offers. Last week, a week in which Trump named a reality TV star as Secretary of Transportation and TV's Doctor Oz to run "Medicare and Medicaid", I was in the woods where I spotted a young bald eagle in one of my trees and came upon a large flock of wild turkeys cackling and squawking with delight that they had survived to see another Thanksgiving. There's not much to be grateful for in the political headlines of the moment, but I'm thankful that Trump has chosen a large number of truly inexperienced people to staff his cabinet and White House. "Fox host, Pete Hegeth at the Pentagon," wrestling Tycoon Linda McMahon at the Education Department, conspiracy Gadflies Tolsey Gabbert and RFK junior as respectively director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Health and a full lineup of Fox News regulars who will run the new administration. Given the destruction that Trump has planned, as the Post Dan Balls put it, his motivation is more about punishment and retribution than effectiveness. I am grateful that so many of his appointees are thoroughly unqualified for the high positions they will hold. It offers hope that Trump's second term, like his first, we see his most egregious abuses hobbled by incompetence.

Shady Hamid:	We'll have more after the break. Welcome back. This is Impromptu. I'm Shady Hamid. And what I'm most thankful for, as well, America, and American democracy. [music] I mean that in a couple of different ways. First, that despite the challenges of the past eight years, we do live in a democracy, however, flawed. And if anything, democracy has shown its resilience. I never much believed in the rhetoric about America turning into a dictatorship, and I don't believe it now, despite all the craziness of the Trump circus. This doesn't mean the next four years will be great. They probably won't be. But still, it could have been worse, perhaps much worse. If the election had been decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of states, the outcome would have been aggressively contested by either side. With each side calling the other illegitimate, mass protests would have been likely. We might have entered a sustained period of uncertainty and genuine instability. So this is what I'm thankful for, that the election results were not contested. That when Trump won as frightening as that was for so many of us, Democrats did not question the legitimacy of the vote. When you've been defeated and your defeat is clear, it's important to accept that and to come to terms with it because only then can you learn what needs to be learned.

Amanda Ripley:	This is Amanda Ripley, and I am grateful for so many things that I had a hard time deciding what to say here. I'm also worried and saddened about many, many things. And what is amazing, is that we can hold all those things in our head at once. But I'll start with the small things. I am grateful for the turkey trot that I'm going to do with ten friends and family members on Thursday morning in the shadow of the White House. I'm grateful for Oh, the fact that "Wicked" is coming out as two movies, I think. That's awesome. I'm grateful for Oh, the fact that MIT is giving free tuition to anyone whose family makes less than $200,000. And also, MIT, by the way, has never given preference for a legacy for people who have relatives who are alumni, which is awesome. I'm also grateful in the aftermath of the election that it feels like there is a tiny but growing movement of people who are starting to see that conflict entrepreneurs, people who inflame and incite division and contempt for their own purposes. They only thrive if we let them. If we are afraid of each other, if we don't know each other, then politicians can exploit us. If we mock and disdain one another, people we don't agree with, we are literally giving them what they want. I feel like more and more people are starting to realize that conflict entrepreneurs want us to feel frightened, so they can promise safety, to feel aggrieved, so they can whip up blame, to split the world into Republicans and Democrats good and evil, that every time we hesitate to comply, to give up on each other, we make ourselves stronger. We build our collective immune system so they can't so easily occupy our minds, even if they infiltrate our institutions. They can do a lot of damage. But what I hope more and more of us are starting to realize is that so can we by giving them what they want. Each time we resist the urge to oversimplify and demonize and dismiss, each time we try again to understand each other, each time we start over new, we starve them of their power. I am really grateful that I know this and that so do many of you. My Instagram feed is crowded with people refusing to turn on each other, to abandon their neighbors, to assume they know millions and millions of other people they've never met. So I guess what I'm saying is, I am grateful for the way that broken systems in the United States give rise to questions and the wild and the new just when it seems impossible. Thanks for asking. Happy Thanksgiving.

Alexander Petr:	[music] This is Alexander Petr. And as I think about Thanksgiving, here are some of the things I'm most grateful for. I'm grateful for the parts of the Internet that still work. I'm grateful for every industry that hasn't been disrupted. I'm grateful that the wicked advertising onslaught may be nearing its end. I'm grateful that if I'm hearing from Matt Gates, it's because someone has purchased an unwanted cameo and sent it to me, not because he's the new attorney general. I'm grateful for my family and my friends, especially for the family members who didn't give my preschooler a bugle for no reason. I didn't do anything to you. I'm grateful anytime I see art or writing that was drawn by a human hand and not generated by AI. I'm grateful that I myself have not yet been replaced by AI. And I'm thankful for bookstores and libraries. The new "Barnes and Noble" in DC is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. And I'm thankful for our readers. Yay, readers, thanks for being you. I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving.

Charles Lane:	That's a wrap. Let me just add my own little piece of gratitude. Today, I'm thankful for Thanksgiving itself. If you think about it, Thanksgiving is an odd sort of holiday for democracy. Democracy is all about the idea that people have a right to be unhappy with the way things are and that they should speak up and try to change the status quo when they think it's justified. The word gratitude is not in our Constitution, though the word grievance is right there in the First Amendment where it says, we all have a right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. A sense of gratitude is closely related to a sense of perspective. And what we just heard from our commentators was in one way or another, all about keeping what's going on today in perspective, putting their concerns in the context of things that have happened before, things that it's reasonable to expect in a fallen world. And frankly, a sense of things could be a lot worse. A sense of perspective is what President Abraham Lincoln meant to encourage when he set the precedent for our modern celebrations by proclaiming the final Thursday of November 1863 as a national day of Thanksgiving. The whole country was being torn apart by a horrible civil war. So Americans had every reason not to count their blessings. Lincoln nevertheless called on us to consider what he called, "The bounties which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come." We're the world's oldest constitutional democracy, and we dedicate a day to that purpose, that putting our grievances in perspective every year. Enjoy it. This episode was produced by Hadley Robinson, edited by Damir Marusich, Chris Slantrop, and Allison Michael, and mixed by Emma Munger. Chris Rukan designed our art. Special Thanksgiving thanks to Mili Mitra and Deirdre Byrne. Thank you for listening to Impromptu. What are you grateful for right now? Let us know at impromptu at washpost.com, and we hope you enjoy the holiday.


https://podcast.posttv.com/vitac-transcripts/f140e58e-255f-4bed-9770-a281ce57814e_67462130c612a0155e2444e1-transcript.txt

Hadley Robinson

Damir Marusic

Chris Suellentrop

Emma Munger

Eavesdrop on Post Opinions columnists as they have frank, thoughtful conversations about the news and cultural debates on everyone’s minds. 

Impromptu: The conversations before the columns 

As many head off for Thanksgiving after a disorienting month, our columnists tried to find anything in the world — in news and politics and their lives — to be grateful for. They had to dig deep, but they found gratitude for traditions forcing them toward normalcy, for the systems that work and for Matt Gaetz making Cameos instead of being the next attorney general.

Michael Lewis

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As potential deep cuts to federal agencies dominate headlines, it’s more important than ever to understand the people who make the government run.

She’s the future. How does the government keep her?

As potential deep cuts to federal agencies dominate headlines, it’s more important than ever to understand the people who make the government run. In the final installment of our “Who is Government” series, comedian and filmmaker W. Kamau Bell delves into the antitrust division of the Justice Department and learns about the surprising ways it can help America live up to its promise.

A little-known secret: Washington Post Opinions columnists like talking to one another. They don’t always agree, of course, but they are in almost constant conversation – testing their ideas, refining their thoughts and sometimes changing their minds. Now you can listen in on some of those conversations. Each week on “Impromptu,” Post columnists go beyond hot takes and have personal, candid conversations on the latest topics in news and culture that we can't stop thinking about. Listen in on the conversations that happen before the columns are written. New episodes every Wednesday. 

Washington Post Opinions columnists offer frank commentary in conversation about the latest news moments

Impromptu podcast from Washington Post Opinions

A little-known secret: Washington Post Opinions columnists like talking to one another. They don’t always agree, of course, but they are in almost constant conversation – testing their ideas, refining their thoughts and sometimes changing their minds. Now you can listen in on some of those conversations. Each week on “Impromptu,” Post columnists go beyond hot takes and have personal, candid conversations on the latest topics in news and culture that we can't stop thinking about. Listen in on the conversations that happen before the columns are written. New episodes every Wednesday.

Frank, thoughtful conversations on the news and cultural debates we can’t stop thinking about, from Post Opinions columnists.

Searching for gratitude

Searching for gratitude

She’s the future. How does the government keep her?

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