Thanksgiving Proclamation: Hope, Healing, Unity, Acceptance…and Football

We’ve been here before, America. We’ve arrived at many Thanksgivings of the past divided, confused, anxious, depressed, frightened and disillusioned.

Thanksgiving has been with us since the end of the Revolution, through terrorist attacks, segregation, two world wars, a Great Depression, the Civil War, slavery and the burning of the White House to the ground.

Football has been part of Thanksgiving longer than you think. High schools and Ivy League colleges played Thanksgiving football in the 19th century, when the South was still occupied by Union forces. The NFL has played on Thanksgiving through Prohibition, soup kitchen lines, the McCarthy hearings, civil rights marches, Watergate and more, only pausing for a few years during World War II.

We go through our rituals this year of prayers, turkey and pigskin, hoping to feel better. It isn’t just the bitterly divisive election that has left us feeling fragile. It has been a year of shootings in the streets, shootings in nightclubs, standoffs on reservations, floods, droughts and a growing distrust of our neighbors, a fear of both the powerful and powerless.

But hey, there are three good NFL games on Thanksgiving, so that will make us all feel a little better for a few hours, right?

What a trivial sentiment. This Thanksgiving must be more than a meal and some games. Football has the power to be part of something bigger, something better.

But it will take clearer, bolder voices than mine to point the way.

Our beloved country is free and strong. Our moral and physical defenses against the forces of threatened aggression are mounting daily in magnitude and effectiveness. … We have not lost our faith in the spiritual dignity of man, our proud belief in the right of all people to live out their lives in freedom and with equal treatment. The love of democracy still burns brightly in our hearts.

— Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Thanksgiving proclamation, November 8, 1941, a month before the bombing of Pearl Harbor

Holiday depression is a serious, well-documented problem. The American Psychological Association reported that 52 percent of Americans experienced election stress in October. That stress has not abated in the last two weeks of protests, hate crimes, controversial appointments, angry rhetoric, safety pins and Hamilton.

Regardless of how you voted, you have loved ones who are teetering on the brink of anxiety and depression, friends and family who have become divided. Compassion cannot be a partisan initiative.

“It’s a transition,” says Eric Hipple of After the Impact, a depression treatment facility for veterans and former football players. “When people are not prepared for a transition, it can be traumatic.”

Hipple spent many Thanksgivings in our living rooms as a Lions quarterback in the 1980s. Now, he provides outreach and support services for depression sufferers. He equates the post-election feelings of many Americans with those of an NFL player who suddenly gets released and faces a whole new life away from football.

“Things that keep us out of stress are the things that are predictable, things that we can control,” Hipple says. “When you go through an abrupt change, some of those things can be ripped away. That brings the fear of not knowing what could happen next.”

Hipple’s advice for helping a struggling loved one is simple and universal: “Understand them. Don’t say, ‘You shouldn’t feel that way. It’s happy time!’ Don’t deny their feelings. But then encourage them that they are not alone. Encourage them that things are going to be OK.”

As our power has grown, so has our peril. Today we give our thanks, most of all, for the ideals of honor and faith we inherit from our forefathers—for the decency of purpose, steadfastness of resolve and strength of will, for the courage and the humility, which they possessed and which we must seek every day to emulate.

— John F. Kennedy’s Thanksgiving proclamation, November 5, 1963, 17 days before his assassination

Things are going to be OK. That’s easy for a white, straight, Christian, middle-class man like me to think and say. But you would …

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