EDITORIAL

The Least We Can Do
Happy holiday season, folks. This year we all deserve to have an especially nice holiday season, as it’s been by and large and globally speaking, a pretty crappy year. For those still depressed about the national election, take heart, and if we think of a good reason to, we’ll be sure and pass it along. But the future ain’t over till it’s over, and heck, it’s just starting. You all took care of those last-warm-days caulking and stapling and crack-stuffing projects, right? Okay then. You’re insulated, sort of.
You got all your wood in too, right? No? Well at least you got a half-decent price locked in for the winter on heating oil, that’s good. And for those of us who thought we were pretty smart betting on propane, boy were we dumb. Sure seemed a decent hedge against OPEC, countin’ on a fuel source that comes from, you know, North America. Not this year. Must be all that political instability out in Alberta, eh? Yup, you gotta get up pretty early in the morning to get a square deal from those Canadian natural gas producers, what with their corporate offices in Delaware and all. In fact the only energy refiners who haven’t price-gouged are the ones who cut heat to length with a chainsaw. Thanks guys. Too bad your trucks don’t run on wood.
Hey and you younger people; you really have to stop losing so much sleep over whether you’ll ever see a penny of that big old Social Security trust fund. Things go right you may have the opportunity to lose a good portion of it yourself in the stock market, assuming you’re not too busy serving in a compulsory non-military national service draft, probably coming to a post office near you before the leaves come back. And we should probably all just quit worrying so much about that merger between Walmart and China, it’s happened already, done. That’s where your money’s gone, by the way. They collect it in Wal Mart and Target and Home Depot and ship it to China, though not in the bottom of those empty containers we send. Plus as part of the deal we get stuff to take home, stuff we could never afford to buy if it were actually made in a place that had environmental, labor, or human rights laws.
How about the dollar losing 30 percent of its value against the Euro in 3 years? It’s OK. Soon our whole country will be flooded with Portugese tourists, since a trip here will be cheaper for them than a nice dinner in Barcelona. That’s good, plus they’re polite and they drive on the right side of the road. Hey and what about our whole 160 million-job service economy being outsourced to India? Ever try ordering a printer cartridge from Delhi, I mean Dell Computer? There’s an international experience, all the historic inefficiencies of commerce in south asia, with none of the good food or stunning spiritual sophistication to cut the taste. Tough to compete though, against well-educated people earning $2 an hour. And if you go there sometime, you can probably get a ride in a bicycle-taxi from a guy with a graduate degree, maybe two, in the humanities. Strange, much of this stuff, like in that old Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times.”
Thankfully however, none of this has anything to do with the holidays coming up, the truly great time of year for our uniquely American civilization. This is the time when the richness of our own spiritual collective shines the brightest and where it matters most: in our own eyes, and in the eyes of those we love and who look to us each day, our family both intimate and extended.
Thanksgiving is our preeminent secular holiday, and it’s evolved that way because what it celebrates is fundamentally humanistic and religious at the same time; a story of deliverance and the survival of our forefathers because of the compassion, generosity, and basic human decency they found in a world so different than the one they’d left. We celebrate this of course in the context of the gathering of our families, and perhaps because the holiday season is so much about that, it’s also a time that for many accentuates our sense of separateness. More than at other times, we often feel the void left by those whom death has separated from us, and yet are no less a part of us than those we see every day. It’s a time we’re often better able than usual to see ourselves reflected in our parents, and as parents, our children reflected in us. It’s also a time when our hearts turn to those whom fate and our own choices have separated from us, the family circles that have changed, the recollections of what was, what could have been, and the dreams of futures that turned out differently than we’d imagined.
Everybody’s got some of this to deal with between now and New Years, along with what’s often a fairly stressful schedule of juggling time, work, money, and the responsibilities we choose to take on as well as the ones we don’t. We’re all spread a bit thin and strung a bit tight; let’s try and cut each other a lot of slack.
We hope people will reach out this season, especially to those most needing it and for whom accepting is often the hardest. The strength of our community is in its compassion, our caring and respect, and the ways we honor and protect each other and the special qualities, the unique richness, of this place that sustains us. Perhaps we can’t make our nation a beacon of light to the world just now, but we can make our communities a center of faith in the future, and a reflection of the best within us that we can summon. The least we can do is try.