Merry Christmas

My wife and I received our boosters yesterday. I received mine from a retired doctor. He was there to make things work. Several other retired health care workers and members of service clubs were there for the same reason.

Christmas isn't about me. It's about others. And it's about joy and possibility. Whichever and however you celebrate this season, may you also know joy and possibility.

Merry Christmas.

Image: Wonderopolis

Christmas 2019

We live in a time and place where grievance fills the air. We're constantly reminded of how we've been short changed and what we don't have. But, every year at this time, we're reminded of our possibilities -- of what we might achieve if we practised a simple principle -- good will to all.

We need more good will and less grievance. May all of you find more good will during this season.

Merry  Christmas!

Image: The Toronto Star

During This Season

Every so often, my back rebels and I can't sit or stand at the computer for any length of time. I have recently experienced another such rebellion. But I am on the mend, and I will be back on a regular basis shortly.

I can't let this opportunity go by without  sending every one my best wishes for these holidays. This is the time of year when we contemplate Peace On Earth and Good Will To All. Given what we face, we desperately need more of each commodity.

May you know both peace and good will during this season.

Image: Queens Symphony Orchestra

And So This Is Christmas

And, John Lennon asked, what have you done? These days, we -- the collective we -- do  little that is noble. Everywhere we look, Folly appears to be in the driver's seat. But, every year at Christmas, we are reminded of another kind of folly. It's not the folly of what we possess, but the folly of what we give. It's perhaps best expressed in O. Henry's short story, The Gift of the Magi. The final paragraph of that story is famous:

The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—
who brought gifts to the newborn Christ-child. They were the first to
give Christmas gifts. Being wise, their gifts were doubtless wise ones.
And here I have told you the story of two children who were not wise.
Each sold the most valuable thing he owned in order to buy a gift for
the other. But let me speak a last word to the wise of these days: Of all
who give gifts, these two were the most wise. Of all who give and receive
gifts, such as they are the most wise. Everywhere they are the wise ones.
They are the magi.

Such folly is wisdom. May we have more of the same in the New Year.

Merry Christmas.

Image: ShowClix

Christmas 2016

Around the world, hatred for migrants is on the rise. Michael Harris writes:

The National Front in France is flat-out anti-immigrant. The ultra-right mayor of Beziers was quick to point out that the terror suspect in Germany was once again a refugee. “The wave of migrants,” he said, “is a wave of death.”

Austria now has its Freedom Party, which spouts the same anti-immigrant line.

Even in Germany, which has been a beacon to the world in its acceptance of over a million desperate people displaced by war in the Middle East, the extreme Right is rising.

The Alternative for Deutschland party, once mired at 3 per cent in the polls, could get as much as 16 per cent of the vote in the 2017 elections. They want to ban minarets and calls to prayer and march under the slogan “Islam does not belong in Germany.”

The Great Orange Twitterer wants to ban all Muslims from the United States.

When World War II ended, this country welcomed hundreds of thousands of those who had been our mortal enemies:

After the universal slaughter ended in 1945 and millions had to leave a shattered Europe, 270,000 Germans made their way to Canada to start a new life. Despite having been the mortal enemy of Canada and the Allies for five brutal years, they were taken in.

Like the Germans, the Italians also came to Canada, though they arrived in two distinct waves after both great wars. For part of the time in between those wars, they were designated as ‘enemy aliens’. Italy was the enemy in the Second World War and yet 500,000 Italians came to Canada for the same reason as the Germans — to start a better life, in what they hoped would be a better place.

History shows that we are better than the hate mongers who presently strut their stuff upon the world stage -- something to think about in this time of  "good will to men."

Happy Holidays -- and good will -- to all.

Christmas 2015

                                                      http://quotesgram.com/

This is that time of year when we look back on the old year and look ahead to the new one. My sense is that, while the world is in a darker place at the end of this year, Canada's situation has improved. We have started to return to our vital centre, after turfing a government of which Ebeneezer Scrooge would have approved. 

Like Scrooge, Stephen Harper approved of darkness and the cold. Dickens wrote that Scrooge was:

Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

As a species, Canadians are not Scrooges. True, there are Scrooges among us. Mr. Harper was one of them. It's too early to tell which of Dickens' characters Justin Trudeau resembles -- although at the moment he appears to be Scrooge's nephew Fred, inviting us to spend Christmas dinner at his and his wife's table.

We'll have a better idea of who he is next Christmas. But for today -- and for this year -- Merry Christmas to all.

The Economic Argument For Peace On Earth

                                                  http://www.victorystore.com/

"Peace On Earth." We repeat the phrase often at this time of year. It's standard boilerplate -- a postive suggestion, but not very likely. However, Paul Krugman wrote this week that there are realistic reasons to support the suggestion. Those reasons have been around for awhile:

More than a century has passed since Norman Angell, a British journalist and politician, published “The Great Illusion,” a treatise arguing that the age of conquest was or at least should be over. He didn’t predict an end to warfare, but he did argue that aggressive wars no longer made sense — that modern warfare impoverishes the victors as well as the vanquished.

Krugman believes there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Angell was right. Iraq and Afghanistan stand as sad examples of the fact that the spoils of conquest are no longer what they used to be. And Vladimir Putin's recent empire building offers more evidence that conquest no longer pays:

Look at what passes for a Putin success, the seizure of Crimea: Russia may have annexed the peninsula with almost no opposition, but what it got from its triumph was an imploding economy that is in no position to pay tribute, and in fact requires costly aid. Meanwhile, foreign investment in and lending to Russia proper more or less collapsed even before the oil price plunge turned the situation into a full-blown financial crisis.

So what does the evidence tell us about the guys who keep insisting they're the smartest guys in the room?

Let’s not forget how we ended up invading Iraq. It wasn’t a response to 9/11, or to evidence of a heightened threat. It was, instead, a war of choice to demonstrate U.S. power and serve as a proof of concept for a whole series of wars neocons were eager to fight. Remember “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran”?

The point is that there is a still-powerful political faction in America committed to the view that conquest pays, and that in general the way to be strong is to act tough and make other people afraid. One suspects, by the way, that this false notion of power was why the architects of war made torture routine — it wasn’t so much about results as about demonstrating a willingness to do whatever it takes.

Christmas isn't about doing whatever it takes. It's about doing for others not to others. Merry Christmas to all. Perhaps next year there will be more peace on earth.

The entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

Merry Christmas

It seems to me that Dickens had it right. We live in a bipolar world.  Your life and the lives of your children depend on good fortune and the world in which you live. It is either the best of times or the worst of times:

It is the age of wisdom, it is the age of foolishness, it is the epoch of belief, it is the epoch of incredulity, it is the season of Light, it is the season of Darkness, it is the spring of hope, it is the winter of despair.

And that is why, at Christmas, my thoughts always return to A Christmas Carol. Scrooge was the arch-typical Neo -Conservative. Dickens knew him well. But he also knew that redemption was in each person's grasp. And that is why, at the end of the tale, Scrooge

became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

After all, the point of life is not to have everything, but to have enough -- and to make sure that others have enough. That is not the attitude of our present masters. But Scrooge -- and Christmas -- remind us that there is always hope for a better world.

Merry Christmas!

Dickens For The 21st Century

Every year, as Christmas approaches, I think again of A Christmas Carol. The world has always been opposed to the idea of Christmas -- unless it can be turned into a money making proposition. If Christmas can serve the ends of business, by all means, it should be celebrated.

But, as Marley's exasperated ghost reminded Scrooge: "BUSINESS? Mankind was my business! Their common welfare was my business!" The common welfare has always been under attack by the forces of greed  -- no more so than in the last three decades -- when those forces have established well protected bunkers in both Ottawa and Washington.

And, all too often, religion and capitalism have formed a noisy alliance -- like the chains Marley's ghost dragged around with him. The result has been an assumed Divine Sanction, wherein Christianity is proclaimed to be on the side of the wealthy. That is why the Ghost of Christmas Present warned Scrooge:

There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."

That alliance has produced darkness -- the perfect metaphor for ignorance. If there is a common theme among many of those who stand for office these days, it is how little they know. "Darkness is cheap," Dickens wrote, "and Scrooge liked it."

Scrooge's journey is from darkness to light -- from ignorance to wisdom. For one hundred and sixty years, readers and audiences have cheered when he finally gets the point his ghostly visitors have been trying to teach him:

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.

Once again, hope dictates that we must not shut out the lessons that they teach.

This entry is cross posted at The Moderate Voice.

To Banish Ignorance and Want

My wife and I attended a performance of A Christmas Carol at our son's school last Friday evening. It was a production which took itself seriously -- which is what all productions of Dickens' classic should do. Something else it did, which many such productions choose not to do, was to present on stage the two orphan children cowering under the Ghost of Christmas Present's robes -- Ignorance and Want.

While everyone takes joy in Scrooge's redemption, many of us miss the significance of those two orphans. They are always there; they follow the Present throughout his journey. And, in truth, they will always be there. They are there because they are the incarnation of what Marley tells Scrooge was the ghost's -- and what should be -- Scrooge's "business."

Christmas exists for many reasons -- the laughter of children, the gathering of family, the memory of He whose birth we recall. But the holiday should never pass without all of us recalling that "mankind is our business." It was so in Dickens' day, as it should likewise be in our own.

Strangely enough, Scrooge has a distinctly contemporary ring these days. In fact, when he asks, "Are there no prisons, no workhouses?" he seems to be advocating the kind of social policies many Western democracies have adopted over the past twenty-five years. History does have a way of repeating itself.

But history does not have to repeat itself. Dickens' message is all about renewal -- even at the last minute. We still have the opportunity to redeem ourselves and redirect our lives. Christmas reminds us the that it is everyone's business to help banish Ignorance and Want. If we dedicate ourselves to that task, we can share Tiny Tim's wish that God will bless us -- everyone.