The Christmas Hope: A To-Do List for a Better World

Guest Post by John W. Whitehead

“The Christmas hope for peace and good will toward all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian. If we don’t have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power. Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are going to perish together as fools.”Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Christmas Eve sermon, 1967

As a child, my Christmas wish list came right out of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue—toys, board games, bikes, action figures, etc. My parents, like so many in their day, belonged to the working-class poor, so while I never lacked for the necessities of life, many of the items on my wish list never came to be. Even so, I was no worse off for it.

I wish the same could be said of those still unfulfilled items on my adult Christmas wish list. Each year, I wish for the same things—an end to war, poverty, hunger, violence and disease—and each year, I find the world relatively unchanged. Millions continue to die every year, casualties of a world that places greater value on war machines and profit margins than human life.

I’ve seen enough of the world in my 68 years to know that wishing is not enough. We need to be doing. It’s not possible to solve all of the world’s problems right away. For most people, putting an end to world hunger, poverty, disease and the police state may seem too insurmountable a task to even tackle. But as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, there are practical steps each of us can take to hopefully get things moving in the right direction. Here’s what I would suggest for a start:

Tone down the partisan rhetoric, the “us” vs. “them” mentality. Politicians frequently perpetuate a “good” versus “evil,” “us” versus “them” rhetoric which pits citizen against citizen and allows the politicians to advance their personal, political agendas. Instead of wasting time and resources on political infighting, which gets us nowhere, it’s time Americans learned to work together to solve the problems before us. The best place to start is in your own communities, neighbor to neighbor. After all, at the end of the day, it makes no difference what politician you voted for—Republican, Democrat or otherwise—politics will never be the answer. Politicians have mastered the art of creating dissension, but they’re all the same. Grassroots activism is the only kind of change you can count on.

Turn off the TV and tune into what’s happening in your family, in your community and your world. Read your local newspaper. Attend a school board or city council meeting. Get involved with a nonprofit that works in your community. Whatever you do, reduce your intake of mindless television and entertainment news. The only reality programming worth taking notice of is the one playing in your home and community.

Show compassion to those in need, be kind to those around you, forgive those who have wronged you, and teach your children to do the same. Increasingly, people seem to be forgetting their p’s and q’s—basic manners that were drilled into older generations. I’m talking about simple things like holding a door open for someone, helping someone stranded on the side of the road, and saying “please” and “thank you” to those who do you a service—whether it be to the teenager bagging your groceries or the family member who just passed the potatoes. As author Robert Heinlein observed, “A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot…”

Talk less, listen more. Take less, and give more. If people spent less time dwelling on and attending to their own needs and more time trying to help and understand those around them, many of the problems we currently face could be eliminated.

Stop acting entitled and start being empowered. We have moved into the Age of Entitlement, where more and more people feel entitled to certain benefits without having to work for them. There’s nothing wrong with helping those less fortunate, but as my parents taught me, there’s a lot to be said for an honest day’s work.

Remember that all people are endowed with inalienable rights. I’ve heard a lot of chatter in recent years in favor of torturing detainees and denying basic rights to non-citizens, but doing so not only goes against everything that the U.S. is supposed to stand for, but it also goes against every principle common to all world religions—forgiveness, charity, nonjudgmentalism, nonviolence, etc. America cannot continue to lambast terrorist groups for their contempt for human life and dignity when our own nation violates these same principles time and again.

Stop being a hater. Increasingly, we as a society have come to reflect the hostility at work in the world at large. This is so even in such a virtual microcrosm as Facebook, where “unfriending” those with whom you might disagree has become commonplace. How can we ever hope to curb the hatred and animosity that have spurred global terrorism over the past few decades if we can’t even forgive the human failings of those in our immediate circles?

Learn tolerance in the true sense of the word. There’s no need to legislate tolerance through hate crime legislation and other politically correct mechanisms of compliance. True tolerance stems from a basic respect for one’s fellow man or woman. And it should be taught to children from the time they can understand right from wrong.

Treat women like people, not things. If pop culture and the media are any reflection of how women and girls are viewed today—primarily as sex objects—then one can only wonder what exactly the women’s rights movement has been doing in recent years. The use of sex and its impact on young girls is particularly troubling. As professor Henry A. Giroux observed: “Market strategists are increasingly using sexually charged images to sell commodities, often representing the fantasies of an adult version of sexuality. For instance, Abercrombie & Fitch, a clothing franchise for young people, has earned a reputation for its risqué catalogues filled with promotional ads of scantily clad kids and its over-the-top sexual advice columns for teens and preteens; one catalogue featured an ad for thongs for ten-year-olds with the words ‘eye candy’ and ‘wink wink’ written on them. Another clothing store sold underwear geared toward teens with ‘Who needs Credit Cards …?’ written across the crotch. Children as young as six years old are being sold lacy underwear, push-up bras and ‘date night accessories’ for their various doll collections. In 2006, the Tesco department store chain sold a pole dancing kit designed for young girls to unleash the sex kitten inside.”

Value your family. The traditional family, such that it is, is already in great disrepair, torn apart by divorce, infidelity, overscheduling, overwork, materialism, and an absence of spirituality. Despite the billions we spend on childcare, toys, clothes, private lessons, etc., a concern for our children no longer seems to be a prime factor in how we live our lives. And now we are beginning to see the blowback from collapsing familial relationships. Indeed, more and more, I hear about young people refusing to talk to their parents, grandparents being denied access to their grandchildren, and older individuals left to molder away in nursing homes. Yet without the family, the true building block of our nation, there can be no freedom.

Feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and comfort the lonely and broken-hearted. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Take part in local food drives. Take a meal to a needy family. “Adopt” an elderly person at a nursing home. Support the creation of local homeless shelters in your community. Urge your churches, synagogues and mosques to act as rotating thermal shelters for the homeless during the cold winter months.

Give peace a chanceSo far, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers more than $4 trillion, and that doesn’t even begin to approach the human cost in lives lost—military and civilian—and families rent asunder. The military industrial complex has a lot to gain financially so long as America continues to wage its wars at home and abroad, but you can be sure that the American people will lose everything unless we find some way to give peace a chance. We can start by bringing all of our men and women in uniform home.

Start your own teaspoon brigade You don’t have to solve all the world’s problems single-handedly, nor do you have to solve them overnight. Little by little, you’ll get there, but you have to start somewhere. It is up to each of us to do our part to make this a better world for all. As the legendary singer, songwriter and activist Pete Seeger once remarked to me:

I tell everybody a little parable about the “teaspoon brigades.” Imagine a big seesaw. One end of the seesaw is on the ground because it has a big basket half full of rocks in it. The other end of the seesaw is up in the air because it’s got a basket one-quarter full of sand. Some of us have teaspoons, and we are trying to fill it up. Most people are scoffing at us. They say, “People like you have been trying for thousands of years, but it is leaking out of that basket as fast as you are putting it in.” Our answer is that we are getting more people with teaspoons every day. And we believe that one of these days or years—who knows—that basket of sand is going to be so full that you are going to see that whole seesaw going zoop! in the other direction. Then people are going to say, “How did it happen so suddenly?” And we answer, “Us and our little teaspoons over thousands of years.”

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bluestem
bluestem

Nice list, we should all be shepherds, John

Dutchman
Dutchman

Black child- “Mama, what is socialism and what is racism”?

Mama- “Well son, socialism is when the white folks work so we can get our benefits like free healthcare, free rent, free food, free cell phones, free cable, and free internet.”

Black child- “But mama, don’t the white people get mad about that”?

Mama- “Yes son, they sure do. That’s called racism”.

Stucky

Nice list … too long ……. and it’s kinda “pie in the sky” thinking.

My Christmas wish list is much shorter; —– I hope bb gets a brain.

Stucky

“Give peace a chance.” ———— from the article

Sure.

OK, chil’run, Sing along now!

Stucky

For bb …

just imagine the possibilities

Westcoaster
Westcoaster

Good advice Mr. Whitehead. Thanks for sharing and for all you do throughout the year to support Freedom, Liberty, and the Constitution.

backwardsevolution
backwardsevolution

That’s all good advice. Forgive those who have wronged you? That is timely because I’m going to have to do just that this Xmas. I’m going to forgive this bonehead idiot because – well, I’ve been a bonehead a few times in my life as well. Okay, I’m going to suck it in. Done!

hardscrabble farmer

“Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete.”

I must not understand what wisdom and experience mean.

It is precisely this kind of false rhetoric that creates the kind of deep and unresolvable conflicts within our own societies. We might want this to be true, we may hope and pray that a day will come when it is, but clearly wisdom born of experience leads to no other conclusion than the exact opposite. War, gfar from being obsolete, appear to be a central and driving force in mankind. It exists at virtually every level, in every era, throughout all forms of governance, driven by ideologies as varied and disparate as there are types of humans. In fact, far from being obsolete, war is as relevant as any social factor and as old as humanity.

The list above has some reasonable points, but most of them read like the kind of pap you’d expect to hear from a thumbgadget fapping douche in hipster glasses. Don’t be a hater? Really? You’re almost 70 and you’re going on about social media like that’s going to fix the problem of war. It’s shallow, it’s vapid to the point of absurdity, but more than that it shows such a fundamental lack of real wisdom that it is embarrassing to read. Treat women like people and not like things. The obvious question is who exactly is posing for all those sexually objectifying photos? Who is wearing the kinds of sexually provacative clothing he describes? Are women humans with free agency? If so then maybe the better advice is for women to act like people and not like things. He’s got the politically correct cart before the horse.

There’s more, but its Christmas eve and I’ve got kids, I don’t want to start my day railing on a politically correct old man who quotes Pete Seeger.

Gee whiz, why did I click on this?

bb

Thank You Stucky , one of my favorite movies . I used to watch that movie with my grandparents. My.grandmother really like Judy Garland.It was one of the first movies they saw when they got their first TV.(1955)

flash
flash

JW- Treat women like people and not like things.

ugh…last time I checked , respect was earned and not a mere privilege granted the emoting sex.

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http://anti-gnostic.blogspot.com/2014/12/what-is-this-signalling.html

As GK Chesterton most profoundly advised ,make sure you know why the fences where put up before you take them down. Once the old guards of civilized society have passed and the fences are down ,war is the only means by which the old -civilized -order of society can be restored.

The inferno of runaway stupid will have to be extinguished or it will consume all humankind has worked to establish since time immemorial…gird your loins. it’s coming.

For a primer on the future of modern war based on fact and fiction , start here:
Riding the Red Horse

Book Description
Publication Date: December 12, 2014
The spectre of war once more looms on the global horizon. A new generation of writers and military theorists are addressing the new forms of warfare that now challenge the nation-state’s monopoly on war. Terrorism, technology, 4th Generation warfare, the decline of the Pax Americana, and the rise of China are among the issues contemplated by the 20 contributors to RIDING THE RED HORSE, the new annual anthology of military science fiction.

RIDING THE RED HORSE is a collection of 24 essays and short stories from technologists, military strategists, military historians, and the leading authors of military science fiction. From the Old Guard to the New, the anthology features some of the keenest minds and bestselling authors writing in the genre today. Three national militaries and three service branches are represented by the contributors, the majority of whom are veterans.

Edited by LTC Tom Kratman, US Army (ret) and Vox Day, RIDING THE RED HORSE covers everything from real-world lasers, intelligence ops, threat assessments, and wargame design to space combats, fleet actions, and ground operations taking place in some of the most popular future universes in science fiction.The anthology consists of contributions from Eric S. Raymond, William S. Lind, Chris Kennedy, James F. Dunnigan, Jerry Pournelle, Ken Burnside, Christopher Nuttall, Rolf Nelson, Harry Kitchener, Giuseppe Filotto, John F. Carr, Wolfgang Diehr, Thomas Mays, Benjamin Cheah, James Perry, Brad Torgersen, Tedd Roberts, Steve Rzasa, Tom Kratman, and Vox Day.

card802
card802

“May the light of faith, the warmth of heart, and the love of family be your gifts this year!”

flash
flash

The deviant propagators of militant atheism are not happy with the taking down of fences, they want to scorch all Christian tradition associated with serving the needs of others as well.

but, sometimes the Christmas spirit wears a steel -toed boot.

“We are getting some calls that people don’t like our windows at Discount Mattress & Furniture /Airport Mall. We understand that you will not shop here and we are sorry if it offends you..To those that asked us to take the scene down…we are sorry that you don’t believe as we do but the windows are staying as displayed until January 1st. If our sales decline due to our window scenes then we will shut our doors and still give the glory to the Lord.”

http://counterculture.bangordailynews.com/2260/bangor-store-stands-firm-after-getting-complaints-for-jesus-themed-windows/#.VJNUVCzW2Z8.facebook

Atheists Stop School From Donating Food, Money To Church Pantry, Claim Great Victory

By Robert Gehl, December 20, 2014.
After successfully scuttling a school’s food drive for a local church, atheists are cheering.

In a letter to a South Carolina school district, the American Humanist Association threatened to sue if students at Oakbrook Elementary School in Ladson didn’t stop raising money for a local Baptist Church’s food pantry.

The Dorchester School District Two caved and “agreed not to sponsor or endorse churches and religious institutions in the future.”

http://downtrend.com/robertgehl/atheists-stop-school-from-donating-food-money-to-church-pantry-claim-great-victory/

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SSS

“The list above (in the article) has some reasonable points, but most of them read like the kind of pap you’d expect to hear from a thumbgadget fapping douche in hipster glasses. Don’t be a hater? Really? You’re almost 70 and you’re going on about social media like that’s going to fix the problem of war. It’s shallow, it’s vapid to the point of absurdity, but more than that it shows such a fundamental lack of real wisdom that it is embarrassing to read.”
—-hardscrabble farmer (HS)

Goodness. I know it’s Christmas eve, and few will read that stinging critique from HS, but I had the exact same reaction he did when I read the article. 100% insipid. HS and I share at least one thing in common. Neither of us wears rose-colored glasses.

EC
EC

It’s Christmas Eve, a time to wrap gifts, trim the tree, drink eggnog, make a bunch of tamales and have a few friends over for brewskies. Instead, folks insist on keeping the kids up until midnight so they can open ‘a couple’ of gifts. Then you wonder why they don’t wait until after the wedding to take a stick to the piñata, so to speak. Soon kids will be unwrapping gifts on the eve of Christmas Eve, having babies long before thinking of making a commitment to marriage, retiring long before ever looking for a job. I can see it now, mark my words, it’s a comin’.

El Coyote
El Coyote
El Coyote
El Coyote

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