No reason to be Jolly
FinalCall.com
Except to
the Captains of this society and their merchant and baker allies who preach the
"Gospel of Spending and Consumerism" by the poor and neediest this time of year
as the answer to the nation's economic problems, this no "season to be jolly."
Take a look at the following definitions:
Nostalgia:
"a wistful or excessively sentimental, abnormal yearning for return to some past
period or irrecoverable condition."
Sentimentality: "marked or governed be the emotional idealism, resulting from
feeling rather than reason or thought."
Our nostalgia pays for the corporate greed, which 76 years ago gave us the
character we know today as "Santa Claus." The jolly old fellow in the red suit
with a twinkle in his eye was created by Coca Cola in 1931, based on the poem, "Twas
the night Before Christmas." The soft drink manufacturer commissioned several
images as paintings for holiday campaigns in leading magazines for decades.
Nostalgia,
sentimentality: These words are better to describe what far too many Black and
Brown and poor people in this society experience this time of the year. Billions
and billions of dollars spent to escape feelings of emptiness, low self-esteem,
and a lack of love all self-esteem, and a lack of love all year long. But those
words mask the one word that really describes the season: "materialism."
This is no season to be jolly.
By every standard of measure, the objective reality of the living conditions of black people in America is getting worse compared to Whites, and we now have an entire generation of our people who are actually living below the socio-economic standard of the preceding generation.
We yearn for the "Good Ol Days," even thought days weren't so great either. By spending money-money we often don't have we attempt to compensate for our spotty performance as providers, as parents, as companions all year long. That perpetuates the myth of the so-called Christmas holiday spirit; the false illusion that was is doing better because of our cars and the trinkets we wear and give to one another.
Most of the
holidays we observe and Christmas is chief among them are days off from
plantation work given by out slave-masters. "It was festive; a time that we
didn't have to be out in the fields and the slave-master gave us a lot of
alcohol and liquor. The drinking and dancing led right into the culture that we
pretty much celebrate to this day, which is basically about rebuilding the gross
national product, "we are reminded by Ashra Kwesi, a lecturer on African
history, civilization, religion and culture.
Our celebration fuels the economic engine which drives the society. And of
course there are our eating and drinking habits. Bad diets, compounded with
alcohol consumption, make this Christmas season one of the most dangerous times.
According to a study by the American Heart Association, patients hospitalized
with a heart attack in December are more likely to die than similar patients
admitted at other times.
Ironically, as fasting and more cultural celebrations such as Kwanzaa take hold in our communities, some are given to complain that these more spiritually grounded and restrained celebrations are not as much "fun" as the debauchery we engage in, the name of Christmas parties.
As the U.S. housing industry takes a nose-dive, thanks to the corporate greed which drove the sub-prime mortgage industry crisis the U.S. and world's economies are facing a major recession. The "Greenback" the U.S. dollar has fallen to its lowest level against other world currencies ever, and yet as last as December 17, President George W. Bush told the world that this nation's credit crunch and mortgage problems pose challenges, but that the overall economy is sound. "We've had a pretty good economic run," Pres Bush told members of the Fredericksburg, Va. Rotary Club, after waiting his turn to speak like an ordinary club member, so that he might burnish the speech's appearance of grassroots authenticity.
More
gimmicks; photo opportunities, more nostalgia and more sentimentality masking
corporate greed, mean while, no solutions are forthcoming to America's problems
let alone even any consideration of the far more complex problems of blacks,
Latinos, immigrants from the West Indies, Latin America and South Asia, and
poor. Whites.
This is no season to be jolly.
This is no season to be swept away in the tide of materialism and false doctrines, which are just fancy ways to impoverish us, to separate is from our money, and keep us distracted from the real race and class politics in America, according to Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, an author and political scientist.
This is a season for a unified assault on the transmission of HIV and AIDS.
This is a
season for better behavior among all our youth and the leaders of our "street
organizations" that will eliminate the pretext of the military assault on our
neighborhoods by police, killing our people then ruling it "justifiable
homicide." This is the season for confronting the reality of growing racial
hatred against Black that we see in the form of nooses in our schools and
workplaces.
This the season for true peace and goodwill among human beings, not based on
false, hyped-up, nostalgic wintry scenes on television commercials, and re-runs
of mythic movies about miracles in downtown department stores.