Thankful for Much

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Nov. 22, 2025

For many of us, Thanksgiving is the best of holidays. No gifts are required, there is good food and good company available in abundance, and distant relatives, long-forgotten friends, and stragglers with no other place to go can all find a welcoming place at the table. Lively conversation will surely follow, though some might want to avoid any and all things political.

Despite overt philosophical hostilities and a barely functional government, we can be thankful for much.

For example, we can be thankful if we are among the 85.5 percent of Americans not experiencing food insecurity this holiday season. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports about 18 million households representing about 13.5 percent of the population experienced food insecurity during the year. It likely won’t help that this year’s Thanksgiving dinner will cost about seven percent more than last year, according to The Detroit News.

(The USDA defines food insecurity as lacking access to food of sufficient quality to provide adequate nutrition or simply limited or no access to food at all. It’s why giving money or non-perishable food items to food banks is more important now than ever.)

We can be thankful if we have a roof over our heads to protect us from the elements, including the cold now arriving. The Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness tells us there are 250-275 homeless at any given time in their five-county region. But their area—Grand Traverse, Antrim, Benzie, Leelanau, and Kalkaska counties—includes about 182,000 people, so we can be thankful the number of people seeking accommodations isn’t much bigger. Advocates would rightly argue even one homeless person is one too many, but 0.0015 percent of the population is not terrible.

Census.gov tells us we should be thankful if we were not among the eight percent of the population who had no health insurance at any time last year. The other 92 percent all had coverage for all or at least part of the year. Employment-based insurance is still the most common though the numbers covered by an employer are ever-shrinking. Just more than a third of us are insured by Medicaid or Medicare or some combination of both.

Insurance costs have continued to climb, and without extensions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies next month, premiums will climb dramatically. Premiums for non-ACA coverage increased nearly seven percent last year and should increase again this year according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Congress did not act on the ACA when they ended their recent shutdown.

Most of us will be doubly thankful if the ACA tax credit subsidies are restored. Without them, insurance premiums might at least double next year according to KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation), CNN, the Brookings Institution, and several other think tanks and research organizations.

We should certainly be thankful the U.S. is emitting a bit less CO2 than we have in previous years, making our air a little cleaner to breathe, unlike in some parts of the world that saw their air quality deteriorate.

We are very lucky and should be thankful we live in a part of the country where fresh water is not an issue and clean, safe drinking water is readily available. We cannot be apathetic about protecting it.

Losing secure sources of clean water is already an issue in some parts of the American Southwest and becomes increasingly problematic in areas like Florida where rising seas are infiltrating their groundwater supplies. According to the World Bank, we’re part of about 74 percent of the world with easy access to safe drinking water, which means nearly 2 billion people wake up every morning knowing they will have to search for clean water and then likely boil it to make sure it’s safe.

(Speaking of water, we’re going to have to make some decisions about how important data centers and artificial intelligence are to our lives because those data centers consume enormous quantities of water. The American Society of Civil Engineers says data centers, depending on their size, use anywhere from 300,000 to 5 million gallons of water every day to help cool down all those banks of computers running constantly.)

There is plenty we should be thankful for because of what we have: family, friends, food, and shelter.

Maybe that’s the real blessing of Thanksgiving, that it gives us a day we can ignore most of the nonsense being spewed by politicians or online trolls or vapid protesters or any of the rest. For one day we can take a deep breath, ignore our phones and our computers, and reacquaint ourselves, actually in person, with people important in our lives regardless of everything else. For that we can all be especially thankful.