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7 things Americans can be grateful for on Thanksgiving

It’s been a tough year in some regards for the United States, from a divisive election campaign to the Orlando mass shooting. But there have also been numerous points of progress.

1. The number of families in poverty decreased

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
Seven-month-old Amy Zayas waits in line with other impoverished children and their families to receive free back-to-school supplies from the Fred Jordan Mission on Skid Row in Los Angeles, California, U.S., October 6, 2016.

In 2015, the poverty rate for US families was 10.4 percent, the lowest level since 2008.

And the national poverty rate fell for every age bracket, though significant numbers still live in poverty: 19.7 percent of Americans under the age of 18, 12.4 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 64, and 8.8 percent of Americans over 64.

Of all races and age groups, the poverty rate of black Americans under the age of 18 decreased the most in 2015, from 36 to 31.6 percent.

The poverty rate also dropped in every part of the country, including the West, South, Northeast, and Midwest.

Story Hinckley/Staff
Source: US Census
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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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