Merry Christmas, Happy New Year

From: David McReynolds

Subject: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year

This goes to my Disarmament list and the EdgeLeft list (to the latter, let me say I feel guilty that I have

not written more, and more often - too easy to blame age. If I had any New Year's Resolution it

would be to do better, though I gave up on New Year's Resolutions many years ago!).

 

As age edges upon one, there is, gradually, less time for those things which we once so easily

handled - the gifts and the Christmas cards. However in this case I'll let the modern technology

of the computer and email come to my rescue in extending holiday wishes. This photo was

taken last week at the Metropolitan Museum where I'd gone with relatives for an evening of "Christmas

Music With Brass". The shot is of a large Christmas tree which is set up in a central location in the

museum.

 

There is, with age, not only the usual diminishments of mind and body, but an awareness of the

horrors of the last century, which continue even as I write this, with bankers enjoying huge end of

year bonsuses at the same time working families see their homes lost to foreclosure, and the

corporate medical industry triumphs in a health bill that is a disaster. The power of those with great

wealth is a good reason why the concentration of such wealth must be ended by estate taxes,

and why, for our own health and safety, we need, while waiting for something like democratic

socialism, to move immediately to demand that the drug industry be nationalized. The very tragedy

of the impoverishment of the working poor is one more reason why all of our foreign military

bases - close to a thousand - need to be closed, and Obama's mis-adventure in Afghanistan

brought to an immediate end.

 

But that partisan paragraph aside, there are times when I think of the years through which

I've lived and the horrors we, the human race, have inflicted on one another. Horrors which

cannot be laid so easily at the door of capitalism. Pain which cries out for a more universal

lament. The more than twelve million innocents who died in the Nazi death camps, with their

deaths not coming swiftly, but as an end of days and weeks and months of fear and hunger.

 

The horrors of the Gulag in the Soviet Union. The horrors of the Palestinians in Gaza. The

cold winters in post-war Germany when the world didn't care about the fact the defeated

Germans had no shelter, and little food. The ruins of all the Japanese cities, not only

Hiroshima and Nagasaki but all of them.  Remembering my own youthful and fearful bus

trip through the Deep South, in 1949,  my sense of total the oppression imposed on the

Black community - and wondering how Obama, born too late to have experienced these

things in his own life, can be so reconciling toward the wealthy, so indifferent toward the

poor. I think of my visit to Cambodia in 1981, and the "death pits" where the skulls of those

executed by Pol Pot were being excavated and piled up, blindfolds still in place over their

bones.

 

These things are not the fault of one political system or another, of one class or race. These

are pains we have inflicted on ourselves. We worry, with good reason, about the rise of

terrorism, but forget that terrorism was here before the new birth of Islam, and that our own

actions are also terrorist.

 

I'm not sure there have been any "good centuries", but this last one has been so painful

to contemplate that it may be in a class of its own. We have mastered technology but we

- the "unversal we" of Israelis and Palestinians, Muslims and Christians, capitalists and

communists - have turned it against each other with suicide bombs and drones.

 

I write these words - and of all the Christmas notes I've sent this past few days this is the

only one where I've permitted my sense of the cold, pain, and hunger of our times to slip into

my words - not to diminish our need to celebrate these holidays with joy, but also, and here

I borrow the words of the poet Adrienne Rich, which came in a holiday letter from Richard

Deats, to say:

 

   "My heart is moved by all I cannot save. So much has been destroyed I have to cast

   my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute

   the world".

 

You are one of those in the special "camp" of men and women who struggle for the liberation

of all. We need this holiday, not only for the reality of the pagan joy of knowing the shortest

day is ending, and the light is coming, but to remember that the best of our Western values

came from a carpenter's child, born in a manger.

 

So, it is in that spirit that I truly wish you a very Merry Christmas, and a joyous New Year,

 

Peace,

David McReynolds