The holiday season is here, heralded by decorations in stores, 24-7 holiday music on the radio, silly commercials- and we haven't even had our Thanksgiving turkey yet. There is a lot of worried hand wringing on the news regarding the impact of the current economic disasters in our culture and how it will impact shoppers and businesses this season. I feel for those who are feeling a drastic cut in their livelihood this year, and pray for their happiness. At the same time, I welcome them to the world of those who deal with bad times constantly. This is not a cynical statement made in bigotry against the comfortable, just a mild rant in honor of reality.
In thinking more about this situation, I think about our experience as human beings at this time in our culture. If we're lucky, we grow up in a world of marvel and fantasy as children, we then learn how things work and we go to work in relationship with things and people. We gather experiences, create hopes and dreams, some realized, some not, depending on what we've been taught, and what we've been willing to sacrifice for them. While we're doing all of this life passes by without notice and, suddenly, we're old. We fight our emotions, our mental illnesses, addictions, choices, and even if we succeed materially, we may fail miserably as humans, or at least, at what we believe a human being should be.
Along the way it is very easy to become despondent, to give up, to check out. Reference the young man who recently killed himself on line while countless others watched as if it were just another act, just another spectacle created for their viewing pleasure. No one intervened until it was too late, the tension was just too sweet to interrupt. And what of the thousands of people out there who reach this point and take their lives with no one watching? What of those we tend to think of as nothing more than human debris, those who pollute the web with every type of debauchery imaginable in search of - what? Something, anything. The prisoners, the junkies, the disabled, the cast offs of pop culture. What a downer to even have to think of them.
This holiday season, when its time to carve the big 25 pound turkey and chase it down with a few bottles of vintage zinfandel that had to be opened from the stash we were saving, we can thank goodness that at least we have our sanity. OK, I guess that was a little cynical. Sorry. There is just so much more than all of this. There is much more than to try and drink away the pain and heartache caused by the lost value of the old 401k or the shrunken equity in the overvalued, overpriced and over-commissioned house we live in. So much to be thankful for.
Thanksgiving in times of economic despair? Yes! My wife challenged my family to cut up pieces of paper and write things we were each thankful for and put them in a bowl to be taken out and read during thanksgiving dinner. Two teenagers and two adults, suffering economic disaster like nobody's business, how can there be thankfulness? The bowl was not big enough to contain the slips and now they've moved into a large vase.
Happy Thanksgiving and God bless everyone.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment