Thanksgiving - an opportunity to give more than “thoughts and prayers”.

By Rob C.

Art by R.J. Matson

TL;DR: Gratitude is a beautiful thing and we have a lot to be grateful for, but let’s stop pretending millions of hungry Americans are invisible just because it makes the wealthy feel better about their seasonal charity photo-ops.

I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving Day feast — the turkey, the mashed potatoes, the stuffing, and of course the annual ritual of pretending that everything in America is totally fine for 24 hours because there’s pie on the table.

But once the dishes are put away and the leftovers are packed into Tupperware, reality comes knocking: millions of people in the richest country in the history of planet Earth don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

Yes — the “greatest nation on Earth” has 45 million people who need food assistance just to get by. And despite what the Fox News crowd likes to hiss between bites of their second helping, these aren’t people who are “too lazy to work.” Most are hardworking Americans. Many are disabled, chronically ill, elderly, or caring for children. And every one of them deserves the basic human right recognized around the globe: freedom from hunger.

But here? In America? Somehow we’ve turned hunger into a moral failing.

And why? Maybe — just maybe — because a certain political party has spent half a century demonizing the poor on behalf of their billionaire benefactors. Ever since the Reagan era, the GOP marketing department has been running a nonstop smear campaign portraying struggling Americans as freeloaders while their wealthy donors skip out on $500 billion in taxes every year. Funny how the people demanding subsidies and bail-outs are never the ones accused of “dependency.”

Gratitude is important. Gratitude keeps us grounded. Gratitude keeps us human. But gratitude doesn’t require blindness. It doesn’t require pretending this grotesque imbalance is normal or acceptable.

So as we enter this season of “counting our blessings,” maybe we also count something else: the number of children in this country who go to bed hungry while working parents juggle two jobs. The number of seniors choosing between groceries and medication. The number of families standing in food bank lines that stretch around the block while CEOs congratulate themselves on “record profits.”

We don’t need to shame the poor — we need to fix the damn system.

And while we’re at it, maybe we stop acting like feeding people is charity instead of the bare minimum responsibility of a functioning society.

Thank you to all my readers — for caring, for thinking, for refusing to accept cruelty as policy. I’m grateful for every one of you.

— Robert Cain, author of Democracy for Sale