The Christmas Season

With the holiday season upon us, I was thinking about f how conservatives and the religious right try to claim that the country, patriotism, religion, marriage, or even holidays fall within their own purview.   They have done that with the Founding of the US, turning Jefferson and Franklin into religious zealots that they never were. 

We see the fights at city halls around the country over displaying Nativity Scenes.

It was a Republican presidency that pushed the idea that it was our patriotic duty to shop in order to restore the 2008 collapsing economy. And that idea was never truer than at Christmas time.  So I asked myself, what does Christmas mean really? is it too commercial, is it strictly a religious holiday or culturally does is now encompass so much more?

Christmas Customs

According to this website, we don’t really know why Christmas is celebrated on December 25th but it definitely looks like it has some relationship to earlier celebrations of the Winter Solstice. Before there were Christmas carols, there were pagan carols sung around the Winter Solstice. Ironically, the Puritans in England and then later after they emigrated to the US were very much against the singing of Christmas carols. They actually attempted to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.  This trend surfaced several time in the US and it was not really until the 19 century that Christmas was taken in by more conservative Christian groups that were spawned by the Puritans.

So as with all things, the history is much less cut and dry. Perspectives change. Institution change and what is conservative now would have been radical once. We can all define what Christmas means to us and none of us have to be right or wrong.

Third World America

Arianna Huffington makes many of the points in her book, "Third World America" that I found in Barbara Garson's book, "Down the Up Escalator".  Huffington shares statistics and examples of many middle class Americans that met their demise not only from the economic downturn of 2008 but even before. Her fear, which is a consistent theme, is that there will someday soon be only those who belong in one extreme or the other. 

Defining the middle class statistically is difficult but you know it when you see it. She gave some income ranges but I felt that the low end of 45,000 per year for a household is pretty darn low if that income has to support several children and a mortgage in a location with high property values. On the other hand, if a couple is retired with a paid for home, then that can become a comfortable income. 

She points to the obvious culprits. Washington is completely broken and controlled exclusively by Wall Street and high priced lobbyist who speak for corporations and not people. While President Obama has at least tried some things to help, his successes are limited and approaches are timid. She points to the recovery act as a positive idea but because the substance was put together by politicians who are bought and paid for, it was not able to do what the WPA did during the Great Depression. 

She spends a great deal of time on the "Too Big to Fail" banks and what an obvious scam it was to bail them out. If they were in fact too big to fail, then they were too big. And why has there been no meaningful reform? Well again, we know the answer to that. You can hardly call it capitalism when corporations take no risk for loss but pocket all the profits. 

What does Arianna Huffington, publisher of the The Huffington Post suggest we can do to turn things around? A lot of her ideas are not political and fall into the realm of what we can all do as human beings to help our fellow citizens that are suffering. She also suggests we boycott the big banks and keep our money in local small banks or credit unions. This is an idea that I love and fully support. She does suggest that we absolutely must have vast, meaningful campaign finance reform. Without it, we will never be able to look to government to do the right thing. And without a government working for the best interest of the people, it is really hard to imagine that anything will ever change.