Tom McLaughlin

Let’s keep this simple, and let’s keep people safe: Thanksgiving is upon us, and painful as the thought may be, it can’t be a holiday the same as any other.

Odds ‘n’ ends for a pre-Thanksgiving week:

Look, no one likes being the nag or the bearer of bad news or the three-alarm fire guy, but folks, we need to talk.

With its weird slew of vote returns coming in fast and furious, Tuesday night looked for a time like the most 2020 thing ever in this accursed year of 2020: a budding general election disaster leading to a wholesale breakdown of public order, with fellow citizens in a closely divided nation at each others’ throats over the identity of the next president. Daylight, thankfully, brought some clarity.

As we head into Election Day next Tuesday, it’s worth noting that if America chose popularly-elected presidents — that is, the candidate receiving the most votes — this race would effectively be over and Joe Biden would be our presumptive President-elect.

At a time when most of us are frustrated and upset and angry on a regular basis — there’s no shortage of material to stew over — it serves no purpose to play the part of the Town Scoldilocks, telling everyone else what they’ve been doing wrong throughout this miserable pandemic. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be given a heads-up about the 20-car pileup straight ahead before they plow their bandwagon smack into it.

The world is a scary place, yet we’re often slow to pick up on mean and nasty ogres in our midst, before and after they strike.

We’re now three-quarters through the worst year in living memory and the hits just keep on coming.

On the plus side for Donald Trump, at least no one is asking about his taxes at the present moment.