Good morning and happy Thanksgiving. First, take a quick look: Is your oven actually on? These days can be a scramble with kids and relatives and constant robocalls with area codes from your hometown that you mistakenly answer over and over, thinking it might finally be your old high school football coach calling to tell you it was a mistake to keep you on the bench those four years back in the early 2000s and that you guys definitely would have made it to State if they only let you be the holder on field goals, a massive relief that would put an end to the vivid dreams you keep having. It’s hard to keep your mind focused on the task at hand, especially if you carry the responsibility of cooking The Bird.
We’re going to talk about what each NFL team should be thankful for this year, but before we get started, I’ll throw something out there myself.
I took my kids to vote on Election Day, and we live in a town that skews slightly opposite of where I’d find myself most of the time (something that I do enjoy and that has given me the ability to have conversations I wouldn’t normally have if I simply lived on Twitter, which also colors some of my writing in a way that I hope represents a broader swath of the population). There was a 35-minute wait to get to the one functioning machine, and it gave us all time to get comfortable inside the senior citizens center. We got a new machine this year, and the technology was drastically different, but it allowed us to see a completed paper ballot before it zipped through a return slot, which felt really secure and definitive. Election officials, people we knew from the neighborhood, and also, after the past few years, people who have every reason to be defensive and beaten-down and defeated, were running constant demonstrations. They were running in the back room to get bags of pretzels so my kids wouldn’t flip over a 5,000-piece puzzle in progress on the table behind us. In line, there were conversations about a lack of faith in the electoral system, specifically from someone who did not trust mail-in voting, but it didn’t result in a shouting match. Most everyone seemed willing to give this exercise a shot again with (somewhat) fresh eyes. A few days later, we were hit with a trove of data mapping out how much more willing our area was to vote split ticket, which I’m cherry-picking as evidence that the gradual warming I felt in the polling center was not just a blast of heat intended for the seniors who gather there for bingo and roast beef.
