One can understand why the warmup to this holiday season is so slow. In fact, in some years I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to cancel the whole affair. It’s stressful and often disappointing but people persist in greeting each other with happy holiday greetings.
Looking back over the past six years, it’s easy to see why Americans are suffering from fatigue. The first four years were filled with Trumpster’s lies and prevarications, two impeachments, multiple investigations (of one the most corrupt presidents in history), and a string of indictments of people like Roger Stone and others. Then in year five, there was the capital insurrection, followed by more denials and more than 800 MAGA and Q’Anon believers arrested. The Justice Department is just now getting down to convicting the worst of the lot and No. 45 continues on like a bad salesman who keeps showing up on your doorstep trying to sell us something we don’t want and never taking “no” for an answer.
And what’s he selling this month?
Well, more of the same in the form of old football heroes suffering from one too many concussions-turned-Black conservative surrogates wrapped in Christian homophobia and white supremacy as candidates for office. Can it get any weirder than this? Yes, I suppose it can. And it will, even as the many criminal investigations continue on while everybody else decorates their Christmas trees and light their Hanukkah menorahs.
The Jan. 6 Committee has promised a report that will serve as a gift-wrapped present under the Christmas tree this year, but will anyone actually want to open this present before the next Congress is seated and Kevin McCarthy becomes speaker of the House?
Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic and more than 1 million deaths, it doesn’t seem COVID-19 going away anytime soon. It would be great to go back to hugging and kissing our relatives and loved ones without fear of infection and killing our grandparents.
I suspect we are headed for another two years of far-right partisan lunacy. It’s a gift that keeps on grifting or is it the ugly sweater that keeps getting re-gifted? The Trumpster has already announced his candidacy for 2024 and the only thing that will stop him is if somebody indicts and convicts him for subverting the U.S. Constitution — or at least for making the attempt. Getting him on a violation of the Insurrection Act or just stealing classified documents would put an end to him and his tirades. I am looking forward to the end of his madness. Maybe then we can go back to celebrating the “joy of Christmas” and lighting candles.
I’m not sure how this holiday story ends, but surely there’s a moral to this tragedy hidden somewhere in it. One that seems lost upon us now but is revealed like a surprise ending to a Brothers Grimm fairy tale to scare small children.
What I find encouraging is that amidst all of the anti-Semitic rhetoric floating around lately, our local Jewish Chabad of San Pedro will light a 6-foot public Hanukkah menorah at Point Fermin Park on Dec. 19, the second night of the eight-day Festival of Lights. This is encouraging because this is the very same park that the out-of-town Proud Boys took over trying in the failed attempt to instigate conflict with the anti-fascists in October 2021. I am not of that faith but I do recognize courage when I see it during this time of turmoil and conflict. I believe they deserve the full support of the entire community regardless of religion. As we will report later, Temple Beth El has played an integral part in the interfaith cooperation within this community and survived some of our darkest hours. So perhaps the lighting of the candles, commemorating the ones lost these past years and dedicating ourselves to a renewed sense of redemption is a gift in itself.
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent, and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1
Perhaps this is the time to embrace, the time to search, and the time to speak.