John,

In recent years, Thanksgiving keeps arriving at times with real barriers to feeling grateful.

Hurricane Sandy. Trump’s elections. The pandemic. The war in Israel and Palestine. And more personally, Ady Barkan’s diagnosis with ALS in 2016, and his death just over a year ago.

They’ve all made it harder to feel gratitude. And – I think – more important to dig down and find it.

This year is no different. Trump’s election hangs like a dark cloud over the Thanksgiving table, with its threats to women, immigrants, and LGBTQ communities. We have every reason to believe he’ll amass power for himself, weaken the federal government and undermine its check-and-balances, commence mass deportations, and use the Justice Department and the military against those who stand up to him. I’m not grateful for any of it.

Meanwhile, his election has highlighted big problems we already have: An affordability crisis that’s crushing working families, a post-pandemic sense of disorder, and a government here in NYC and elsewhere that’s failing to bring us together to solve those problems.

But our Thanksgiving assignment is neither to wallow in misery, nor to pretend suffering away. It’s to ground ourselves in gratitude, and build from there.

In the obituary that Sarah Johnson and I wrote about Ady, we recounted a simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking story he told about “singing” This Land is Your Land with his kids, Carl and Willow, long after he had lost his voice and could only type with his eyes. In a moment of honesty, he shared how hard it was not to be the dad he wanted to be, to reckon honestly with all that he had lost.

“But, I have learned,” he then wrote, “and I relearn every day, that the antidote to being sad about everything I don’t have, is to be grateful for all that I do have.”

At his memorial service last January, his wife Rachael made the point even more poignantly. She told us about a time when Ady’s ALS had kept their family from being able to do an activity because it wasn’t wheelchair accessible. Their son Carl was mad about it – and he let his parents know, as 7-year-olds do.

Ady took a few minutes, and then admitted to Carl that yes, ALS made a lot of things more difficult for them. But, he asked Carl, could he think of any way ALS had made their life better? Carl said no. And Ady said: “What about Izzy and Rosalba?” two of Ady’s beloved caregivers. And Carl smiled and said, “Oh yeah,” and gave Rosalba a big hug.

Even in the ALS that stole his life, Ady and Rachael found reasons for gratitude – in the love they shared with each other and with Carl and Willow, in the courage they found by fighting back, and in the care and solidarity they built with so many of us.

That’s what gratitude can do, John. It can take the worst suffering, and help us find the care and courage that make it possible to believe we can build something better.

The vast majority of us don’t have to grapple with suffering on Ady’s scale, and of course that’s a great mercy. But we can accept his assignment to find gratitude in dark times, and then the collective courage it compels.

So, I’ll get started: I’m grateful that my parents just arrived in Brooklyn for the holiday, that Rosa’s home from college, and that we celebrated Marek’s 25th birthday on Monday. (My parents had just arrived in Brooklyn for Thanksgiving in 1999 when Meg went into labor – grateful beyond measure for building this life together with her.)

I’m grateful for the work we keep doing together here in New York, where we’ve had some tangible wins: Codifying abortion rights into the New York State Constitution with the passage of Prop 1 in November. Flipping three U.S. House seats and holding two more. Unpausing congestion pricing so we can improve mass transit and bring cleaner air. Moving “City of Yes” forward so we can build more housing. Making sure the workers who cleaned subway cars during the pandemic get paid a minimum wage.

And, as always, I’m grateful to be a New Yorker. New York City is the greatest City in the world, even if it doesn’t exactly feel that way right now.

Our city and nation is facing a truly precarious time, John. But dark times are when we show our best stuff. New Yorkers stand up when the things that matter are on the line.

Our city has faced many crises together before – the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, September 11th, and yes, Trump’s first term. But by doubling down on our collective courage, we’ve prevailed – even with many losses – by coming together across lines of difference to serve and protect each other, and to insist on a shared future.

Even in the deepest darkness, it’s possible to find gratitude, to leverage that gratitude into hope, and that hope into work for change.

I’m not trying to sugar-coat anything. We’re in for tough times ahead. But I know New Yorkers will never stop standing up together to defend the things we know to be right, protecting those who are vulnerable, fighting for the future we believe in – and rolling up our sleeves to build it.

That’s worth being grateful for.

With Thanksgiving,

Brad