Written by Michael Lewis on November 26, 2025
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Thanksgiving is a perfect day to reflect on the song that a newborn Miami Today appropriated as its theme in the early 1980s.
The lyrics by Johnny Mercer, written in the gloomy days of World War II, captured in a nutshell much of what we should do at Thanksgiving:
You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mr. In-Between
You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith, or pandemonium
Liable to walk upon the scene
In summary, count your blessings.
Part of my job is to shine light into dark corners of despair and point toward ways to repair the seemingly irreparable. In the process, we reveal blemishes on our community. We will continue to do that, because it’s needed.
But once a year, on a Thanksgiving Thursday, we look at what is not flawed. We look at the bright side. Perhaps we should do that more often.
Because while we point out regularly that one or another glass is only half full, today we look at all the glasses that are far more than half full – some are filled to the brim.
The easy way to do that is to think not of today but of the first Thanksgiving, which was celebrated in 1621 by about 50 Pilgrims with about 90 members of the local Wampanoag tribe in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. The three-day festival marked the first harvest for the Pilgrims in the New World and, most importantly, their very survival in their hard wilderness life.
We live in a very different nation where healthcare exists, education and literacy are universal, and security and safety are taken for granted – as is religious freedom, which in the days of the Pilgrims was anything but common. Starvation to them was a daily specter – hence a celebration of a harvest.
So to whomever you give your thanks, we should have plenty of thanks to give. Thanksgiving is a really good day.
First, we all can eat a dinner, and for almost all there is a table over which to eat. If you look around the globe, that is by no means universal.
As for looking at the globe, our family will be sharing Thanksgiving dinner with people who immigrated from other nations. In Miami, the people who say thanks were mostly born abroad yet quickly adopted American traditions, because Thanksgiving is a peculiarly North American custom (Canada’s Thanksgiving actually predates our own by decades).
One of our greatest assets, in fact, is the global influx of energy, talent, goodwill and capital that has built South Florida. Every single one of us or our ancestors, including native Americans, came from somewhere else. That mixture of humanity is correctly pointed to as our greatest strength – yes, even more than our superb geography and climate.
When we think of the many very real irritations in South Florida life, we need to regard them as relative. Look at comparable situations elsewhere, statistical changes, and comparisons with the past. If Publix or Winn-Dixie should run out of cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, how would Pilgrims struggling in a wilderness have regarded our pain at the supermarket checkout?
Historically, over the decades South Florida is far improved. Divisions among groups are far fewer. Opportunities for all have expanded. Standards of living have risen – some of us recall when most folks didn’t have air conditioning and mosquitos weren’t controlled. Try living like that in our summers!
We grumble about painful traffic to work, but we have work to go to and vehicles in which to get there. That is far from a global reality.
We fret about fewer jobs, but South Florida’s rising unemployment is among the lowest in the nation, certainly better than Florida as a whole and far better than the national rate. Now that the federal shutdown is over, you could look it up.
We lament high rises everywhere, but they contain jobs and residences that we otherwise wouldn’t have. It’s like complaining about expressways – what would we do if we didn’t have them?
In a nation increasingly divided politically, our local governments’ decisions are rarely made along party lines. The closer you get to home, the more we wear the same label: Miamian. For that, give special thanks.
That goes double for neighbors and neighborhoods: while local issues may rankle us, we are more together than divided.
We point correctly to an affordable housing gap, and yet two things are true: governments, civic groups and private enterprise are chipping away at the issue (granted, far too slowly), and even our worst housing conditions would be envied on much of the globe. Again, ask the pilgrims or the urban tenement-dwellers of a century or so ago.
As for improving things, we have a pretty good track record. Look back a half century or so.
This community then relied on tourism. When tourism tanked, so did Miami. Today finance, tech, entertainment and other sectors have made the economy far better balanced.
Until 1966 we had no major sports teams. In 1980 we were a violent crime capital and were dealing with more than 125,000 foreign refugees with zero provisions to handle them.
In arts and culture, a half century ago we considered ourselves a cultural wasteland. Next week we welcome an Art Basel influx that only highlights what we have here in the arts year-round.
The fact is, in every category we have a long way to go. We all see the warts. We can do better. We should do better. We must do better. No excuses. We should not only aspire to more but reach aggressively for it.
But today, we give our thanks for what we have achieved and now enjoy, with the understanding that tomorrow we march ahead.
So at Thanksgiving dinner count your blessings – and Accentuate the Positive.