“So Trump is impeached. So what?” That’s what you’re thinking isn’t it? Almost anyone of us could say that, and many would. The age of innocence was the late fifties, and back then Hi Fi was well into its ascendance. Elvis Presley ruled the record racks. Eisenhower was pulling the country out of recession. Ohio was building one of the early “turnpikes” across the north and being new drivers we took off from eastern Pepper Pike suburb of Cleveland to the new airport west. Kennedy was an upstart Democrat and the rest of we outer borough Republicans were tottering uneasily on the brink of change. Our Golden Age was coming to an end. Perhaps every high school senior class experiences that in basically the same way and frames their era with that gloss of sanctimony and ownership of something purely ephemeral.
But history never guarantees kindness, and fact witnesses eventually have to shed illusions for truth. Americans are illusionists first and foremost. Our particular ability to fabricate truth to mean whatever we desire discards our own histories for the purposes of convenience. We decide not to learn from the past. Ignorance is the reinvention of fact as a function of misguided imagination in our current era as we chase our shibboleths down the street to escape the slums of self-despair. And off we go to the market place to distract our indolence from becoming too obvious to our senses.
So now the holidays are here and it’s time to rejoice, skip a time warp or two and try to imagine our better angels as our guides. Discard the discord, discard the impeachment of a president regardless of the level of lawlessness he manifests hourly, discard our confusion over who we were yesterday and what we’ve become today. It’s time for truth and reconciliation to heal the divisions wrought by calumny and slander, three plus years of lying to ourselves that dishonesty can coexist with the truth in the new world of malleable perception. Santa Claus is coming to town and the innocence of the child is perverted by the hypocrisy of adults that allow perversion of honorability to sit in the castle while we await the decent down the chimney of our gifts of retribution. Santa Claus is coming to town, (beat) Saa … nta Clause is coming to town.
I love Christmas personally as do my wife, our kids and their kids. I like Chanukah also, it’s so simple and direct. The deliverance of a people, the miracle of light. That’s what we need now. After being drubbed by the hearings and their inevitable outcomes, we have to wait until January for the Senate to toss respectability in the trash bin and remind us that Christmas didn’t really mean anything real. What were the cash receipts? Yet it exerts a power we can’t deny and holds us in hope that God hasn’t abandoned us to the cosmic comeuppance we so rightly deserve. Because in the end, it’s what we profess and do that saves us.
A friend said, “I pray for those senators and congressmen that their better angels will steer them toward greater compassion.” “I do too,” I replied. Something has to bring in the light, someone, but it’s only ourselves that really do it. Aren’t we the light? Aren’t we the only ones who can change the course of human folly that has gummed up the works for time immemorial? I pray for strength, for the light to show us better ways of being what our destiny foretells. Doesn’t Man and Woman live in metaphorical darkness until we can see and make the shift in our hearts and minds that We are Devine only through and because of our singular abilities to change who we are. We can always be better. We can always be grander. We can always be more compassionate, but the step from our illusions to our own illumination is a commitment and oath to ourselves, that true power comes from love, from the day to day, hour by hour attunement to the highest answers we seek. That is Christmas.
The world of our politics and our day to day struggles we know will be gone tomorrow, but yet consume us today, like all challenges and obstacles we face going forward. Our better angels are always there to help us, and this is the season to cry for their help, for us and for all.
Alan Harris, formerly chef of Noble Feast Catering, is a contributing My Turn writer, working to complete his first novel. Hiker, swimmer, singer, poet, he lives with wife Jane in Shelburne Falls.