Hope

From one jolly-bellied man to another…

Image by Author, created at NightCafe.

Dear Santa,

Hey. I hope you’re doing well. And I apologize for not writing to you for the last 50-odd years, back when I used to scrawl my scribbles on a wide-spaced sheet in my Big Chief tablet, a writing platform that every child of a certain age used to have in their elementary-school years. (Those tablets and those years are long gone, along with, hopefully, some of the cultural appropriation behind the name of said tablet. I’m fairly certain no self-respecting tribal chief signed off on that mess. Then again, Americans have a history of not respecting those who came before them and nobody bothered to get clearance concerning the appropriation.)

Anyway, I didn’t reach out to you for a long time because a certain incident happened along about my eighth or ninth year on this planet, somewhere in there. I’ll refrain from going into too much detail. But suffice it to say that, one Christmas Eve, when I should have been in bed at my Granny’s house but I wasn’t, I ran across one of my uncles doing something that you and your elves should have been doing. To get specific, said uncle was in the midst of putting-together a toy that would be presented to me the next morning as if you (or your diminutive staff) had concocted this gift-testament to my angelic behavior during the preceding year.

I had lots of questions after that happenstance moment, with most of the queries centered on why people who loved me would lie about what is really going on in the world. I must say that my faith in you faltered. Okay, it went beyond that. My faith extinguished. (A similar flame-snuffing would occur a few years later when I finally questioned the teachings of the Southern Baptist church that I was forced to attend as a child, but we’ll save that development for another letter, one that should probably be sent to someone else.) Suffice it to say that the visual of my big uncle carefully constructing something that should have been built by smaller people was a harsh stepping-stone to realizing that you can’t always believe what you’re told.

I strayed from the Concept of You for a very long time, door shut, no looking back.

But lately, as the world around me has become increasingly shaky, with incessant amounts of stupid people procreating more stupid people, I need to find something to believe in again. I’ve searched high and low, looking under rocks and knocking on doors and rabbit-holing my way across the Internet. (Do you know about the Internet? You may not, considering your remote-ass location at the top of this troubled world, and there are times when I wish the rest of us didn’t, either. It can be a nasty, hate-filled thing, especially with all those Stupids procreating and clicking.)

I didn’t find what I was looking for and, to be honest, since I don’t even *know *what it is that I’m seeking, I may not have the bandwidth to recognize the very point of my vision quest. I do know that there is a huge cultural divide in this country. Wait, perhaps I should mention that “this country” is America. I sometimes forget that you have many nations on your mind, what with all the toy-production and Google-mapping that you must deal with every year in preparation for that One Frenzied Day wherein you visit every child on the planet. Well, at least the good ones, if the rumors are true.

Still, I would imagine that you are at least somewhat aware that something is terribly wrong in America, even if you don’t get the Internet. After all, much of the world is abuzz with shocked chatter, watching from afar as democracy is being destroyed in America. (Well, at least in the civilized countries wherein human decency is still considered a value. The citizens in some nations couldn’t give less of a hoot, busy as they are with repression from their own fascist governments.) I’m sure you got a memo about this mess at some point, somehow.

To be fair, there has always been some degree of cultural divide in this country. (Do you remember a little thing that happened here called the Civil War? That was a shameful mess, especially since some folks in the southern quadrants of this country are still fighting that war, still stigmatizing color and ethnicity and liberty for all.) The thing is, though, that The Constant Divide always had, until recently, bridges spanning the gap, conduits that decent people could use to forge compromises between opposing parties. That used to be the American Way. Find a center that helps all of us move forward.

Those bridges are gone now, for the most part. Sure, a few spans still exist, but they are creaky and structurally suspect, especially since the owners of one side of the bridges keep igniting dynamite on the support pillars. Those owners have absolutely no desire to compromise, so why should the other side even try to engage? If your olive branch is continually slapped away, why keep offering one?

So, things are not good. The Divide is now so deep that you can throw a Rock of Decency into it and never hear it hit the bottom. And the now-depth of the equality silence is the result of the current presidential administration doing everything they can to destroy The Constitution and anyone who dares to question that destruction.

This is not America, not what our founding fathers intended when they did their very best to include checks and balances and separation of powers to hopefully ensure that this country would never become a monarchy or autocracy. Sure, those fathers got a few things wrong, which is why we have Amendments to their original conceptions. Course-correcting opportunities, if you will, which is a good thing, another forward-thinking option in our country’s charter. Those Amendments are just as valid as the Constitution, but you wouldn’t know it based on the democracy-abhorrent votes of six member of the current, illegally-stacked Supreme Court.

And that’s the fulcrum, right there. When the highest court in the land is over-populated with folks who have no concept of doing the right thing, instead offering obeisance to a convicted felon, well, what do you do? Once that stacked court ruled that our current president could not be held accountable for anything he did, everything changed. A tyrant became invincible, and the wrecking ball started swinging.

That ball is slamming into something decent on an almost daily basis, destroying structural foundations at a dizzying pace. That’s the whole modus operandi of the current presidential cadre of soulless cadavers: Blitzkrieg the hell out of everything (you know, like one of the Cadavers’ heroes, Adolf Hitler, did to London all those decades ago) with such intensity that decent people can’t focus on any one building because all of the other buildings are exploding as well. Shock and awful, full force, no regrets, no guilt.

Many otherwise decent people in this country (America, just to remind you, I know your map is full) are so overwhelmed by the onslaught that they are losing faith in what was once true in our country. The checks and balances and guardrails of American democracy used to mean that we would never have a tyrant leading the country, never have a king, never have a president who could get away with terrorizing citizens and attempting to destroy anyone or anything that stood in his way. Many of those good people have stopped believing.

Just as I once stopped believing in you, a long time ago and far away. I shouldn’t have done so, and I now regret my hasty, disappointed-child, truculent reaction. Granted, there are some really iffy bits with your whole mythology. (Your reindeer sleigh is going to visit every child with a positive annual progress report in one single night? That’s just not happening, let’s be real.) But the fundamental basis of your Northern Exposure philosophy is just and worthy: Good children should be rewarded for good actions. Bad children should be not be rewarded for their badness. Plain and simple, demarcation line clear. Sadly, there are a lot of adult voters in this country who do not understand this very basic concept. And now we need your help.

Now, I’m sure you have at least two reservations concerning my unrequited reach-out. One, you’re not interested in the politics of it all, instead focused on a specific-agenda yearly flight plan. (Distribute gifts to good children, sample some cookies left on hearths, maybe reorganize ornaments on a few trees just to confuse awakening people, fly back home, done.) And that’s respectable, the apolitical angle. Or at least it used to be. Things are different now, with revenge politics intruding into almost every aspect of our lives. It’s time for folks to take a stand or they might not be able to ever take a stand again.

And two, you’re probably thinking “shouldn’t the religious leaders in your country be doing their best to keep people on a moral path?” One would think so but, again, we’ve got some challenges in that area. First, not everyone is religious. In fact, lots of people aren’t. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s fair to say that non-religious people generally don’t persecute folks who live differently than they do. To each his own. They don’t have to deal with the forced-intrusion of faith leaders twisting scripture to create a twisted narrative, which leads me to my next point.

Second, there are many fundamentalist religious organizations in this country who actually support the cultural devastation spewing forth from the White House. They are all in, continuing to pervert that scripture in whatever way they can, operating under the false belief that our current president will somehow “make this country a Christian Nation again”.

This country was never meant to be a Christian Nation. The separation of church and state is all over the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Amendments, and hundreds of years of precedent-setting judicial law, with a few outlier exceptions here and there that were eventually overruled. You can create whatever stories you want to create to refute The Separation, but those stories are not true.

It’s not that I’m knocking Christianity in specific or religion in general. That life plan works well for many people, and good on ya for that. Embrace the goodness of it all. But the bottom line is this: If you support the current president, then you are not a true Christian, no matter how loudly you proclaim to be one. You are an opportunist who is ignoring the teachings of Christ in order to justify your non-Christian thoughts and behaviors that demonize people you refuse to acknowledge as fellow human beings just trying to live their lives the best way they can.

Love thy neighbor. Full stop. No excuses.

Sorry, Santa. I got a little heated there. It just annoys me, the hypocrisy of pseudo-Christians, the CINOs, Christians In Name Only. But let’s put that aside, for now, other than the thrust of my message being that this country can no longer depend on some religious leaders. We need something more basic, more fundamental, something so easy to understand that there can be no quibbling about how people should behave in order to lead a respectable life.

We need You. And your philosophy that good is good and bad is bad.

Now, I’m sure you’re hesitant about both what I might be proposing as well as the concept of taking on more responsibility than you already have. So, I took the liberty of having my team of lawyers draft a proposal. (You have your own team of lawyers, yes? I’m assuming you do, since many Americans immediately file lawsuits the very second that something bad happens in their lives, even if that bad is the result of them doing something stupid and/or not the fault of the person they are suing. I’m sure you’ve dealt with many helicopter parents pursuing litigation because Little Billy is pissed off that there wasn’t a brand new pony nibbling on the tree, come Christmas morning.)

My proposal is on its way, having handed it off to Rudolph earlier this afternoon. (Rudy and I are tight, in case you didn’t know. We meet every year the day after Christmas, at the Jolly Sailor in Hemington, England, sharing a pint or two and comparing notes. We love that pub, because the staff doesn’t judge and the patrons don’t even blink at two different cultures getting along quite nicely.) The paperwork should be in your hands shortly, assuming that Rudy’s infamous glowing nose doesn’t short-circuit and he manages to find his way home.

The proposal, aside from a few technical but legally-irrefutable paragraphs inserted by my lawyers to ensure that our contract will survive a challenge to the overly-partisan Supreme Court, is simple and straightforward: You and I will work together in an effort to get people to own their actions. If you do the right thing, whatever the situation, you’re gonna get that pony. If you act all ate up with the dumbass and live a life of hate, you’re gonna get sent to your room with no dinner and no presents and no reward. Full stop.

So, I hope you’ll join me. Let’s Make America Gracious Again.

Cheers,

Brian

Categories: Hope

Tagged as: Humor, writing, Hope, Life, Sarcasm, Equality, LGBT, Books, Poetry, Holidays, Short Story, Society, Culture