All I want for Christmas (is for us to be better, for real)
With so much animus animating the world, not to mention the greed, the envy, the vanity, the wrath, and especially the pride, I have to wonder, sometimes, who the good guys really are.
They are each of us, I hope. And they can only be those among us who can find it within themselves to forgive such a wretched little species. Who else, after all, will help us pick ourselves up after we've torn one another apart?
So self-important, this sad little breed. So full of its own bitterness for the world that, for the most part, it alone has wrought.
Hatred and piety are the strange old standbies of our important differences. But, surely, they are not all that we have to offer. And, just as surely, they are not some blind path we will take for good. Or confuse, for long, as some wave of the future.
I guess I'm disappointed with the world today. A world a significant portion of which will celebrate in a few days the birth and life of a man who offered us a better example.
Even if we do not follow it. And even, thus, if his life and death occurred in vain.
Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps we can't be better. Because the world is such a dark and dangerous place and we find it just too tempting to use it as an excuse to be as ugly as we see fit, as well.
What a sad and hopeless punctuation mark that would be to our existence. And, perhaps, if that is the path we are choosing we should get about the business of choosing it and be done with it. No sense in lolligagging on our way to self-righteous self-immolation and mutually assured self-destruction.
Seems like such a stupid path for us to take. Given how little good is done. And how many people have and will always be destroyed in its wake.
But maybe that's all we have to offer.
Because it's so much easier than living with an open heart. And the last thing we could expect ourselves to do is the hard thing. Even if it happens to be the only thing that will ever do any real good.
I don't think that's true, personally. And history is both one long record of our inhumanity and serious failures and our propensity towards greater humanity and to be better over time.
I don't know why, exactly, we have this tendency to celebrate our worst impulses before we give way to our better angels. Why empires defend their bloodshed. Why slaveowners defend their holdings. Why Nazis and Communists indulge their power to destroy. Why all of us mock the compassion and decency that recognizes the evil in all of these. Other than the defense we feel for our own touch of evil.
I'm not sure why, exactly, humanity perpetually defends its inhumanity as wiser counsel. Other than to defend itself from honest challenge we feel too weak to accept.
All I know is that it is human. And that respecting and accepting, better, our humanity is more honest than pretending that its frailties only affect those few who failed in this moment.
And all I know is that I am tired of wondering who the good guys are because their animus and destructiveness looks so much like the bad guys.
It's time we put this ugly legacy behind us. So we can all learn to be better. For real. Just like the man said.
