This Thanksgiving I’m thankful for humanity. Sure, society and I have had our disagreements, but this week is making us all focus on what we have to be thankful for.
I was at an affair Tuesday night in Dallas. While driving home, I noticed some thunderclouds lighting up. Thinking nothing of it, I went to sleep as the line of storms moved in.
I woke up to an email from my afternoon editor, explaining a tornado had hit Arlington, and I should plan on heading that way to start my shift.
The National Weather Service conducted its survey today and found the damage was consistent with winds up to 115 miles an hour.
I woke up and immediately started microphone shovin’. Even as we’re dealing with hospitals filling up with COVID patients and some people just lost everything in a tornado, they were still feeling thankful this Thanksgiving.
I, for instance, am thankful for slickly working “shoving microphones into people’s faces” into my introduction to people now.
That history of post-tornado microphone shovin’ involves Kix Brooks. When he and I started going up to homes that were destroyed by the tornado that hit near Oklahoma City in 2013, people didn’t shoo us away.
In that previous blog, I mentioned a woman who invited us onto her pile of rubble, explaining her house was “kind of messy.”
Then Kix Brooks and I interviewed the governor of Oklahoma together, which is not a sequence of events I would have anticipated in journalism school.
The tornado in Arlington hit as we’re all getting ready for Thanksgiving, and hospitals are filling up with COVID-19 patients.
But people were focusing on what they do have as a result of the tornado, and we’ve all been rallying around each other in dealing with COVID.
For example, I’m showing my support for local businesses by drinkin’. Let me explain:
A brewery in McKinney is now selling 12-packs and donating $4 of each 12-pack to a local fund to help restaurants losing business and local musicians who can’t perform shows [or “gigs,” if you will].
A restaurant in Southlake is serving Thanksgiving dinner. The owner of Feedstore BBQ [which has sold out of Thanksgiving dinners] explained that he’s lost a bunch of business because everyone’s working from home, so Southlake, with its vistas of corporate campuses as far as the eye can see, has been a ghost town at lunchtime.
But he says people are lining up to get Thanksgiving dinner and fixin’s without having to cook it themselves.
When these things happen, people often realize what’s really important. At the risk of editorializing, I would have preferred there not to be a pandemic this year or a tornado this week. But we’re all coming together.
