Every Thanksgiving there is a brief (underscored) kumbaya moment in my household before everyone digs into the traditional spread. We join hands to acknowledge the benevolence and beseech the blessings of the Almighty.
In recent years, I started tacking on an addendum to our prayer, a petition for divine intervention to save the country we love.
Sure, my one-more-thing entreaty has irked some in the motley crew gathered, but it has become ever more pertinent as America stares into the abyss.
Even the most apathetic among us know something is deeply wrong in the nation we pledge allegiance to from an early age.
People are noticeably on edge, worried, broke.
Sticker shock at the grocery store has blown a gaping hole in monthly budgets. Rent increases are ridiculous. Electric bills have spiked.
Paychecks do not keep up with inflation. Wages are down for Ohio’s most common occupations.
It is impossible for many to get ahead in a state that ranks 18th in the country for financial hardship.
To make things worse, Trump’s erratic tariffs are raising prices for Ohio consumers and businesses.
Commerce has slowed. The labor market has softened. Company layoffs surged to a two-decade high in October across the country.
Pessimism is only growing about the state of the economy. Agriculture, Ohio’s largest industry, has been bankrupted by the trade war Trump started.
It has left Ohio farmers, who depend on foreign market demand, in the red.
The promised “golden age” from the convicted felon rings hollow for family farms going under.
It also rings hollow for low-income MAGA faithful left adrift with shredded safety nets after food stamp and Medicaid funding was slashed by hundreds of billions to offset trillions in Trump tax cuts to the ultra-rich.
Working class Trump supporters, who augment their meager take-home pay with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to buy groceries, got a rude awakening recently when their hero callously let SNAP benefits lapse for the first time in the program’s history.
Food aid for the poorest Ohioans was delayed in the longest government shutdown on the books while the Republican-controlled U.S. House left town, the Republican-controlled Senate killed time, and the Republican president preoccupied himself with destroying the East Wing of the White House to build a glitzy ballroom as families went hungry.
Trump fixated on his marble remake of the bathroom off the Lincoln bedroom as more than half a million Ohioans feared being priced out of affordable health insurance if cost-saving subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans were not extended.
But Trump wants to scrap Obamacare altogether and Republican majorities in Congress prefer padding the portfolios of the wealthy to helping constituents who could lose health coverage when the ACA subsidies expire at the end of December.
Meanwhile, when the convicted felon isn’t consumed with garish vanity projects and pocketing $1.8 billion in cash and gifts since his 2024 reelection, he is bent on militarizing U.S. cities with boots on the ground.
Ohio National Guard troops, deployed on nebulous grounds to Washington D.C. in August by a spineless governor, have (inexplicably) had their landscaping and trash removal deployment extended by Mike DeWine until the end of February.
Simultaneously, Trump is presiding over aide Stephen Miller’s unspeakably cruel (and unconstitutional) campaign to brutally terrorize largely law-abiding undocumented and documented citizens with masked goons operating without constraint (or warrants) as the regime’s secret, unaccountable police on a mission to fill deportation quotas with brown people who speak Spanish.
As a child sex-trafficking scandal involving Trump’s longtime wingman inches closer to the adjudicated sexual abuser dozing behind the Resolute desk, Trump is throwing whatever distraction sticks to the wall.
He’s siccing the Justice Department on political opponents, calling for the execution of congressional Democrats, conducting extrajudicial killings of alleged drug smugglers with blown up fishing boats in the Caribbean, threatening an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country (Venezuela) with a massive military build-up off its coast, and rewarding Russia for invading Ukraine.
It’s a lot.
Trump and his sinister Project 2025 architects are moving with all deliberate speed to establish tyrannical rule in America 250 years after Americans fought to the death for freedom from absolute power.
They fortified themselves with the armor of inalienable rights that were non-negotiable.
It was a lot. World-changing. But somehow, enough colonists summoned the courage of their convictions to live free and wrested independence from a despotic monarchy.
They risked much to secure “the Blessings of Liberty” for themselves and their posterity. Until now.
This imperfect union, founded on the intrinsic worth of every human being and rooted in ideals from self-determination to equal protection under the law is hanging by a thread in 2025.
But somehow, those lucky enough to inherit what past generations died to preserve have summoned the courage to push back, to mass protest, to litigate injustice, to hold power to account, to resign on principle, to decry vindictive prosecutions, sadistic ICE indignities, denied due process, threats against judges, election workers, the press.
They often risk much to stand up. But their fearlessness inspires others to follow and secure “the Blessings of Liberty” for Americans not yet born.
At least that’s what I pray for this Thanksgiving and always.
This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal. View the original article.
