Things to be thankful for in Delaware County
I was thinking about Thanksgiving and what we here in Delaware County and in our respective communities might have mentioned as we went around the Thanksgiving table yesterday.
First and foremost, we can be thankful for our lack of natural disasters – that we live in a still temperate climate not subject to wildfires, mudslides, severe tornados, years-long droughts, devastating hurricanes, 60-inch snowfalls, widespread flooding.
Oh sure we get a bit of some of those things every now and then, and as the climate changes, we will get more severe weather events in the future.
But we can be glad we have no idea what it is like to be awakened out of a sound sleep at 7 a.m. and told to drive or run for our lives, or perhaps to never wake up at all, in a deadly California wildfire.
We cannot imagine a fire that eats the equivalent of a football field every second and killed more than 90 people in an instant.
We have resources and people to rebuild after a natural disaster, unlike so many of those burned out areas of California or so many flooded-out small towns in Texas, and North and South Carolina that we have already forgotten about and that may never exist again.
We can be grateful that we have plentiful, excellent medical care with our five teaching hospitals in Philadelphia, two VA hospitals and our large networks of hospitals and clinics and specialists.
Eighty-five rural hospitals have closed across the nation in the last 10 years – 11 of them in 2018.
What do those folks in Wyoming, Mississippi, Kansas and other places who used to depend on them do now for medical care?
I read an article recently about a Missouri woman in premature labor with twins who had to drive 40 miles to get to a hospital.
That hospital could only provide an ambulance to drive her another 60 miles to a hospital staffed and equipped to deal with her high-risk pregnancy.
One hundred miles is farther than from here to New York!
We complain when we must go as far as Lankenau or have to pay for the parking at Wills Eye Hospital.
That mother’s ordeal was caused by changing demographics and it’s going to keep happening as we keep self-sorting to big cities and their metropolitan areas.
Small rural towns no longer have the populations to support hospitals or retail stores or schools and when they close, the town dies.
I am grateful that our great public school systems here in Delaware County and the surrounding Philadelphia area are ensuring our future.
Sure we have some districts with problems – Philadelphia, Chester, William Penn, Upper Darby.
We need to keep hammering the state Legislature to adequately fund and support all of them.
But we need to recognize that our public schools are not broken.
The vast majority of them are doing just fine preparing our children for college or vocations and preparing them for citizenship and adulthood.
We have 14 or 15 colleges and universities in Delaware County alone.
And our community college is thriving and expanding, now serving thousands from Chester County as well as Delco.
I laughed when I read a recent New York Magazine article about Millennials who didn’t plan to vote.
One young man said climate change is going to kill us all in 13 years so why should we bother doing anything.
He was referring to the latest United Nations report on climate change that predicted we only have 12 or 13 years to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
I doubt we will all be dead. A lot may be. I may be.
For sure the world will be increasingly chaotic as refugees flee war, drought and starvation – as so many Central Americans are currently doing –and yes, whole species will continue to disappear.
But I am thankful for our big brains. We humans are creative and inventive. We will cope, are already coping.
We will have electric cars, wind and solar power, green buildings and much more as our imaginations get to work.
Climate change will threaten democracy, and capitalism will have to adapt.
Speaking of capitalism, I for one am thankful that Amazon did not Pick Philadelphia for one of its East Coast headquarters.
The city offered billions of dollars – we don’t know how much because that was kept secret – in tax incentives.
Those incentives would not have not made up for the increased congestion on our roadways and transportation systems, the large increases in rents and home values and the accompanying property tax hikes.
Anything that prevents or delays us from turning into San Francisco and Silicon Valley is to be celebrated.
Our area is currently experiencing steady growth in technology, health care and pharmaceuticals jobs and new homes, retail spaces, supermarkets and restaurants.
We’re doing very without Amazon.
I am thankful for our “19th century” communities that still have 4th of July, Memorial Day and Veterans Day parades, fireworks, Friday night football and Saturday farmers markets.
I love that good people are willing to run for office with all the exhausting knocking on doors and rubber chicken dinners and evenings away from family that entails.
And when they are elected, they serve the people and only very rarely try to rip them off.
I am thankful for the great theater and restaurants in Philadelphia.
For sledding on a snowy day, for soccer coaches, for high school musicals, for holidays and hot chocolate, for family and steadfast friends, for the Salvation Army and City Team and others who reach out to those alone on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I am glad we still have newspapers.
No way I got all this in yesterday when it was my turn to say what I was thankful for.
Nevertheless, I’m not taking any of it for granted. well