November 27, 2019

You’re About to Travel for Thanksgiving. What the Hell Is Happening Out There?

Getting home for the holidays is really, really hard this year.

Stranded travelers in DenverPatrick Traylor/Getty

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Traditionally, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving has been one of the busiest holiday travel days of the year. This week, 55 million Americans are expected to use planes, trains, cars, and buses to get to their loved ones by Thursday. But a combination of blizzards, severe wind, traffic, and a major protest at a major airport has made getting home a herculean effort. Okay, a nightmare.

At the Los Angeles International Airport, several hundred American Airline workers began their a protest for higher wages on Century Boulevard, just beyond the entrance ramp for the airport. The protest began on Tuesday evening and ended later that day with 16 arrests.

The protest caused such a large traffic jam that an ABC affiliate in Los Angeles reported that passengers were leaving their rideshare cars to walk to the airport. “I walked two miles from my Uber,” one woman told ABC. “We were siting for 30 minutes without moving so I just walked.”

More than 1,000 miles away in Denver, passengers didn’t have the option of walking to their destinations. After more than a foot of snow fell in the area on Tuesday, 1,100 people were forced to spend the night at Denver International Airport.

Alex Renteria, a spokeswoman for the airport, said 484 flights were canceled and another 508 were delayed. 

But it’s not just airline travelers who are being inconvenienced by the weather. A powerful winter storm swept through the midwest, causing impossible travel conditions for the residents of Minnesota and others in the region.

Even Smokey the Bear might be affected by the weather. Each year at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the bear and other iconic characters including Snoopy, SpongeBob, and Bart Simpson soar above the crowds who gather on the 2.5-mile route in New York City. But, the National Weather Service is predicting winds up to 26 miles per hour for Thanksgiving Day, meaning that balloons of a certain size may have to be grounded. After a woman was critically injured by a Cat in the Hat balloon in 1997, the city implemented new rules: If the winds exceed 23 miles per hour, no big balloons can fly.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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