Happy Holler-Daze?

“It just doesn’t feel like Christmas this year. I don’t even want to decorate.”

I’ve been seeing that sentiment rolling around social media a bit this holiday season. Haven’t seen similar thoughts with respect to Kwanza or Chanukah, but I would understand it if those celebrations were dulled somewhat this year too by the circumstances of 2020.

Mostly the lack of direct contact with family and friends during the holidays seems to be what people are pointing to as the root cause of their dimmed enthusiasm. Not so many parties and get-togethers, and if they are going to happen at all, just the immediate pod members connect.

And those that have been hunkered down well for the last nine months, interfacing with others mostly electronically, may be experiencing what experts are now calling “COVID Brain Fog,” a condition of weariness, anxiety and confusion brought on by the disruption, isolation and dependence on the devices and screens with which we communicate.

Usually this time of year, the more fortunate of us are able to take a break from reality and indulge in a brief restorative respite with family and friends, but this year the reality of what we have been experiencing remains oppressive and can’t be easily shoved aside, even temporarily.

And I think there’s lots more going on than just the effects and constraints imposed on us by COVID. I think there’s a sense, too, that 2020 was a pivotal year when it became pretty clear that we are just in a world of hurt as a nation for a bunch of reasons. And it all just seems to be coming at us all at once just in time for the holidays.

Yes, vaccines becoming available is a big deal, but new COVID strains in Britain have us and the financial markets freaked. Hospitals remain jammed. There will be no happy holidays for hospital workers, that’s for sure. The death toll mounts inexorably. This disease has already killed more Americans than were killed in combat in World War II, and even with the vaccines it’s going to be months before we see real relief. A lot more people are going to die from COVID.

And if it was just COVID, that would be more than enough, but it isn’t. Our government is a mess and our President is threatening a coup. His political party is just now starting to distance itself from him, even as it is pretty clear he has totally lost his marbles. And all the while the cretins are doing all they can to sabotage the next President. The economy is tanking, and all indicators are that the stock market will get there next.

There just seems to be this sense that 2020 was the year of the great unraveling. Yes, we thankfully elected a new regime in the U.S. that will attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back on the wall, but this holiday season we remain unmoored, untethered and in too many critical ways unhinged. It’s hard to get excited about celebrating when so many people have suffered and will continue to suffer.

And because that suffering selectively impacts people of color, the poor, indigenous people, the elderly and children, that obscene degree of injustice just weighs heavily on us at a time when we are wanting to be joyful, and find it hard to be so.

There is a sense of loss. Certainly there’s a loss of human connectedness, but also a loss of our collective health, jobs, economic stability, sanity in our political system and civility to one another. We can’t and won’t maintain friendships with those whose core moral systems we find abhorrent, will we? Nor should we.

Are we at risk of losing our democracy, even? Kids have lost opportunities to be educated in a social setting, and who knows how they are processing a holiday season like this? Can their parents even afford to give them gifts? Has someone in their family died from this? We are even losing touch with reality, given the burgeoning news organizations that distort it in service of political and cultural dogma and the pandemic of conspiracy theories now delivered as news.

And with all the suffering, we also know full well it didn’t have to be this way. Malfeasance and a lack of compassion at the highest levels of our government has intensified and prolonged the human suffering. And one political party still shows no real interest in measurably reducing that suffering.

COVID, racial unrest, economic devastation and the accelerating climate crisis have also laid bare inequities that have existed in this country for decades; the daily suffering that has been hidden but is now so prevalent it cannot be conveniently ignored.

Who are the people who have lost their jobs? Who are the ones disproportionately getting sick and dying? Have you seen the lines at the food bank? How are privileged children being educated today and how are those less privileged being educated? Who exactly has profited from the stock bubble? What is all this saying about equity and equality for We the People in our country?

The answer is that the haves are just sucking the very blood out of the have-nots.

So, yeah, it’s tough to get real excited about celebrating the holidays this year, and maybe that’s a good thing. Because it shows we are paying attention. It shows we are waking up. It shows we are being empathetic, and it shows we care.

We’re not so much sad for us, as we are sad for others and the state of our country, and that will almost certainly lead to actions on our part to help. The feeling now that all is not right in the world and especially in our country comes from compassion. We sense that we can do better, we should do better and now we are all becoming the activists we must be to make that happen.

This song and its lyrics keep looping in my head. We’re being sent a strong message, and I think we’re finally beginning to hear it.

“Nature’s Way” — Spirit

It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong
It’s nature’s way of telling you in a song

It’s nature’s way of receiving you
It’s nature’s way of retrieving you
It’s nature’s way of telling you
Something’s wrong

It’s nature’s way of telling you, summer breeze
It’s nature’s way of telling you, dying trees

It’s nature’s way of receiving you
It’s nature’s way of retrieving you
It’s nature’s way of telling you
Something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong

Lyrics by Randy California, 1970

So, do have a happy holiday and then gear up for lots of good work and change in 2021. And maybe even a little “good trouble,” right?

“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something…

Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

Representative John Lewis

(Designed and image by J.E. Hargate)