What's So Merry About
Christmas
by
Dick Prosapio
© 2002
Here we are, living in the richest nation the world
has ever seen where holiday car commercials feature somebody getting a
$40,000 SUV as a present and Christmas is most often portrayed on TV
as taking place in some really BIG house in a very up-scale suburb
somewhere (at least not everybody is white in these mansions any more)
and everyone is getting some high tech somethingactually usually more
than one. And yet, all the heart tugger stories we see about now
concern themselves with very poor people getting some (very) little
something, the moral of the tale being that the little things, the
gifts of love, manifest the real Spirit of Christmas, with or without
the historical religious roots.
Meanwhile, in real life, thousands of men,
women and children, who are not the subjects of these sugarplum tales,
are living on our streets, under bridges, in cardboard boxes, in
shelters (if they're lucky) 365 days a year, and some of our country's
corporate execs are carting off millions to their private island
universes taken from companies that have gone bankrupt leaving workers
and investors high and very dry..and these guys were fired! There's a
real perversity about all of this.
Once a year we elevate the poor to heroic status by
making a few of them the center pieces of seasonal morality plays.
"There now." we seem to be saying, "It's all been taken care of by the
Spirit of Good Will to All. Onward to the next holiday; Quick!"
Here's the thing about a lot of street people; some
are out there simply because even two minimum wage jobs can't pay for
an apartment for one let alone a family. Some have been
"downsized" out of those very corporations the execs are fleeing from
and simply can't find work. Some are alcoholics, some are strung out
on other drugs. Some are mentally ill. Some are just out of luck. And
every one of them, every man, woman, child one of them deserves better
than the hard time they are getting handed by this society. We are
operating as though this is the 1930's and times are hard. Ridiculous!
Right about now we begin to get the,
"Please-help-this-needy-family-at-Christmas" letters. "$1.84 can
provide a complete Christmas dinner." "$9.20 helps 5 people." it says
on one letter I got. This is really pathetic. Once a year we're going
to feed one or two individuals or maybe a family, and now we're off
the hook and we can get about the business of shopping?
Recently a local mobile home business gave a family
that had lost everything when their home burned down, a nice used
mobile home. Talk about heart! And people from all around the area
donated clothing, toys, furniture,.whatever this family needed, folks
rallied to get for them. It was a wonderful thing to see and read
about. But the problem is, that's just one family. And they only got
that stuff because they were in the news. And the reason that they
made the news was because this mother has eight kids and they lost
everything. If she'd had just one or two kids, the story wouldn't have
run. These days the losses have to be really big to get attention.
Nobody "rallies" for any less.
Things really started to go down hill for the poor
in this country when the fiscal conservatives got control. They tapped
into that selfish, fearful streak in many of us that responded to the
idea that the "dole", the handout, was a bad thing. "It contributes to
the problem and doesn't solve anything." And, "It makes people
dependent and lazy." they claimed, and they cited studies by their
favorite social theorists to support those ideas.
What they knew was that we who were better off
really wanted to forget about the inconvenience posed by the existence
of the poor in our country and, with a little hocus pocus about
"private charities" and fantasies about re-education "programs" taking
care of the problem of conscience, we could easily be convinced to
just ignore it. Never mind that, "brother's keeper" business. "They
got themselves into the mess they're in and they can sure as hell get
themselves out." they trumpeted. "What we need is tax relief for the
middle class. That's where the problems (and the votes) are." they
shouted.and still do.
And they won. Their point of view is what most
people voted for.so they won. And all the poor lost.
No such hard line, boot strap philosophy for the
corporate down and outers though. They get a few "tough" questions by
a Congressional Committee and, "On your way you blackguard.and take
your filthy millions with you." Yeah, that'll show 'em that we can be
hard on shirkers.
Walt Whitman once said, "I say we had best look our
times and our lands searchingly in the face, like a physician
diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more
hollowness at heart than at presentwe live in an atmosphere of
hypocrisy throughout..the depravity of the business classes of our
county is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely
greater.money making is our magician's serpent, remaining today sole
master of the field." He wrote that in about 1884. One hundred and
eighteen years later would Whitman write any other way about today?
It's said every year at this time, over and over
again, that we wish the spirit of giving that comes over us all at
Christmas would last all year long. But it doesn't. It doesn't last
long enough to effect the strangle hold that greed has on our tight
wad policies toward the less fortunate and our grand give-aways to
corporations. Fact is, it doesn't last much longer than it takes to
get rid of the wrapping paper from the new DVD player opened on
Christmas day.
My family and I are going to have a good Christmas
this year. We have some pain over the loss of a wayward daughter, but
we are healthy, we are making out OK financially.and we love one
another.and we like Christmas. Mostly. And there's not a lot I, or we,
can do about the poor and homeless on our own. Of course I'll send the
letter writers what I can, probably ten bucks to help those five
people, and whatever else we can spare here and there. Every Christmas
we drop bundles of clothes and toys off at one shelter or another. I
know it's too little for so many.
I pray everyday, and vote any time I can, for a
change in the direction for our country. I know that Americans are a
generous people by and large, but we have allowed, perhaps out of
indifference or intellectual laziness, those who appeal to our dark
fears and insecurities, to gain control of high public office from
where they continue to sell the lie that we cannot afford to care. The
fact is, we could create a more equitable society.one that really
would care for its sick, its elderly, its poor, its lost souls not
just once a year, but ALL year, every year. We would have to pay for
it to be sure, but it's not as if we can't afford it. After all, in
our refusal to see the damage our neglect is creating all around us,
we are paying inside ourselves. For every life we are allowing to be
lost to despair and hopelessness we become more hardened, more
cynical, more desperate to be bought off by the merchants of
see-no-evil. As a society all we wind up with is a prettily wrapped,
emptiness.
Nothing is going to change in us, or for us, until a
Merry Christmas is made real for everybody, not just those who can
afford to be overly generous.to each other.
