Merry Christmas, Hanukkah Sameach, and Xin Nian Kuai Le!

We are united by our love of the Organ Mountains, the Chihuahuan Desert, this community, and our homegrown chile, never misspelled “chili.”

We share an ideal of freedom, embodied imperfectly in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and by the imperfect men who wrote those and freed us from the dominion of a king. That they held other humans as slaves sullies their fine words. Nor did they recognize women or folks of other colors as their equals.

Having acted selfishly and thoughtlessly, and spoken out with youth’s arrogance and now with curmudgeonly impatience, I too am far from perfect. I’ve had excellent teachers and wonderful friends, but none has been perfect.

Our country, like ourselves, is a work in progress. While we have grown, and are correcting our Founders’ vision to embrace those whom they did not, we built our powerful country by slaughtering those from whom we took the land, and abusing those whom we enslaved to fuel our economy. We have created deep economic inequality, particularly during recent decades. While we have fought tyranny, we have also bullied many smaller nations into accepting tyranny.

Here’s hoping that in 2021 we have the strength and thoughtfulness to be the best country (and community) we can be. And to listen to each other about what that means to each of us.

In 2020 we are united by the pain and confusion of the plague. We disagree on how best to survive COVID-19, but all are suffering, whether from the illness itself; grief; lost jobs, savings, or dreams; hunger and thirst; or depressing isolation. Our youth have been forbidden their bold explorations: physical sports, intimacy, harmless mischief, trial and error, and “bull sessions,” all compelling and necessary. A year is a huge chunk of a young person’s life. Our loneliest old folks can’t hug us. And consider the breaking hearts of parents who now cannot even feed their kids.

We have focused more on our disagreements than on what we share, just as our bad knee or aching back grabs more attention than the many bodily parts that work just fine. We scream at each other about different political figures, without noticing how much we all love laughing with friends and watching our children grow, or feeling the sunset glow of the Organ Mountains somewhere inside. We enjoy watching light play on the water in an irrigated pecan field, even while we fret over water scarcity.

For most of us, something larger than our ego demands our respect, something we try to honor when we act. It may be God, Allah, or Jehovah Shalom; Changing Woman, Krishna, or Buddha; our connection to humanity, to nature, to Mother Earth; or just a nagging sense of Mystery.

These are difficult times, even without a pandemic. We are bitterly divided. But what if our humility, our love for something more significant, unified rather than divided? If shared humanity outshone petty fears and jealousies?

Without blinding ourselves to the world’s injustices, perhaps we each could reach into our deepest values, which are surprisingly similar, and live by those, while listening critically to how our pastors, priests, and politicians urge us to do so. Practice the love and compassion that Jesus, Buddha, and Changing Woman taught.

It’s a stretch for me, too; but when the Organs go all red tonight, let’s try to share the glow, be the glow, and spread unexpected kindnesses daily.

                                           – 30 --

 

[The above column will appear Wednesday in the print edition of the Las Cruces Sun-News, and appeared this morning, Sunday, 20 December 2020, on the newspaper's website and will shortly appear on KRWG’s website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]

[ A challenge in this column was to handle our country’s past, as well as present conduct I fervently oppose.

I opted for “we” and ”us,” in an effort to accept some responsibility for bad acts from which I probably benefited in some fashion but which preceded my lifetime (or adulthood) or which I strongly opposed. Further, although one side my family was here (in New England) by the mid-17th Century, and I had relatives at Bunker Hill, in the Civil War, and even at Wounded Knee, on the other we were Jews who arrived in the late 19^th Century, with little money and little power, long after many of the worst blots on our national conscience.

I am a white man, and not young. These facts do not disqualify me from opining on controversial matters; but they warrant a certain reserve. That others and their families have suffered at the hands of this country, while I mostly have not, obligates me to listen with extra care to what those folks have to say, and to respect their viewpoints. Too long this country and others have rather assumed that only the voices of literate white men really warranted a listen. To pretend otherwise would be fatuous. However,

redressing the balance, making amends, finding our way toward the best and fairest exchange of ideas possible, is a more subtle task than most folks care to admit. ]

[ “Do you believe all that?” someone asked me, with regard to the column’s somewhat hopeful closing thoughts. Do I believe that we really are so unified, as citizens or humans, and do I believe many of us could see past our divisions? The answer is somewhere between “Yes!” and “I would like to.” I do see, over and over, points in common among my friends who would not even begin conversations with each other. Too, many, whether Christian or Islamic, have misread their religions as

justifying, or even requiring, intolerance and even violence. Some preachers and mullahs whip their congregations into a spiteful frenzy. People professing religions kill and kidnap and otherwise abuse other folks. That’s real; as is the deep bitterness it engenders in victims and their families. And, sadly, it does seem easier somehow for folks to wrap themselves in religion or the flag to exclude others en masse, than to face the strangers and make the subtler observations that come with increasing knowledge of others.) ]

[ How our current national divide stacks up against earlier eras is worth a separate column some day.

We complain of the incivility of Mr. Trump and most politicians (mostly those the speaker opposes, of course). I recall that when I lived on Taiwan, I was a bit startled and amused that national legislators sometimes had fistfights right there on the floor of the Legislative Yuan. Only much later did I read of a U.S. Representative [southerner Preston Brooks of South Carolina, nephew to Senator Andrew Butler] caning abolitionist Charles Sumner of Massachusetts to within an inch of his life on the floor of the U.S. Senate, in 1856. The brutal attack left Sumner unconscious, and he needed three years to recover.

I did know how divided we had felt in my youth, by civil rights and the Viet Nam War. How it felt to be in this country in those days, expressing an unpopular minority viewpoint, was, frankly, quite like the mood in movies set in Nazi Germany or Vichy France, where the protagonist may not be breaking the law but is subjected to minor abuses of power freuqently and is always aware that something worse could happen, with the legal authorities looking the other way or even participating.

But many of our views – racial equality, integration, the wrongness of the War, and even the urgency of fighting poverty – sooner or later became generally accepted ideas, embodied in legislation. Tolerance seemed the norm for rather a long time, though not perfectly so. Diversity (ethnically, artistically, sexually) became more the norm for much of the U.S. However, some combination of vestigial racism and legitimate grievances about how the changing economy had affected workers and farmers gave us Mr. Trump, and a revival of racism in high places. ]