The Christmas Curse


Dear Eugene,

"So this is Christmas, and what have you done?"  There asked John Lennon, then a few others, but none with more moralistic authority than Celine Dion.

The tune is ok, but I'm sorry, the question is wrong, adds itself to an all-wrong world.

Not that it's not a worthwhile question.  Only that there needs being asked a few others, in fact a series of more fundamental human questions before we could arrive at a humble place--ourselves humbled, that is--to genuinely seek the true answer--answer in truth, that is.

To begin with, Why should I do anything about anything?  If there's something wrong with this world, it's a wrong ongoing: it doesn't take a special season to sermonize ourselves into acknowledgement.

And what if I acknowledged all along this world is wrong?  Still, what can I do about it?  It's hard to not read this question as pure cynicism, but really, just say the plain six words and try to answer: What can I do about it?  The answer has to be not much.  And the not-much answer has to bring us back to ground zero, where the world hurts and we feel numb: Why should I do anything about anything? 

 Why?  This has to be the first question, maybe the only honest human question.

 The world's answer is: take good care of yourself, do everything you need to do to make yourself a somebody (or a nobody, if that's your goal), "find" yourself and secure all the necessary elements to work out your self-aggrandizing (self-pitying?) narrative, and you might end up with some scrap to cut others some slack.  (Which is to say, we are not going to answer the question.)

If we suspect all the Christmas "giving" is really schmaltz that's because it is.  "Buy Nothing Day," that's one day, a recent moralizing invention.  Give Nothing Day, that's everyday, an everlasting human default--and Why should we hope for anything different in ourselves?  Christmas is here; Christmas is gone.  We came to expect none; we received the sacrament of bile.

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."  Isn't that the Christmas curse?

Yours, Alex

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