Dot Calm’s greetings of the season

This holiday season is different from those of the past. Why? Hmm, good question. So many serious problems are potentially solvable, or at least lessened, for those of us who have been dealt a kinder life…at least for those of us with the right skin color and access to enough money to live comfortably on.

Today’s tragedies won’t be solved with a Christmas bake sale or a donation to a clothing drive. Something more meaningful, more substantial needs to happen. Maybe we Americans need to consider adopting a family or child from one of the war-torn countries we hear and see so much about. Maybe an orphaned Iraqi child? Or the poor black victims of Katrina or Rita? Or focus on the needs of those closer to home, the "everyday” poor? We see the suffering. Unfortunately, their plights worsen with each pro-rich tax cut, pro-corporate deregulation, and anti-worker policy being initiated by this administration.

America’s wealth and abundance comes with responsibility. The lop-sided distribution of simple necessities jars the senses. 2006 bears challenges for all of us. It’s simple: we are charged with protecting those less fortunate. The “eye of the needle” Bible story comes to mind here.

Which brings me to Christmas.

Once our children reach a certain age, the Santa gig is up. The kids know all about Santa and who he really is, but they’ll play along to humor us parents. Eventually, a friend or older sibling gleefully imparts the news to an unsuspecting child. Each of us remembers who broke the news to us, don’t we?

Yes, the kid network is alive and well, eager to tell…eager to share the Santa fact with a playmate. Til that time comes, though, the innocence of the children is all ours. What fun! What pure joy! And the kids? They lay in their beds on Christmas Eve barely able to contain their excitement, promising each other to stay awake all night…eventually succumbing to an excited sleep. If they live in a Christian household, they are listening to the commotion outside their bedroom doors. They mentally go over the list of hints they dropped inconspicuously all year.

Then it changes. Now they are checking sizes and styles as they open their booty. The time has come to level with them. It’s a sad time for us parents to acknowledge when the gig is up.

For our family, it took our parish pastor, Monsignor Sharkey, to provide wisdom and gentle guidance from the pulpit to direct our next move.

One Christmas, my daughters learned about less fortunate kids, starving kids living in far away countries. Each family was given a cardboard rice bowl. Ours sat in the middle of the meal table every Thursday. On that day, we ate rice for dinner, putting the food savings into the rice bowl. After the rice dinner, we read from the Bible.

It was time to discuss what each wanted for Christmas that year. There was still a surprise or two for each of them. One Christmas, we really went overboard and surprised one with a guitar we knew she wanted but didn’t ask for. Her face as she opened that oddly-sized package made the expense worth it – she still has and loves that guitar, and, by now, it has been with her for over twenty years. Yes, as they matured, each asked for less.

The transition was complete and painless. The focus was simply changed from their wants to the needs of others.

As the family matured, we established a $5 limit: we had only $5 to spend on each other. That’s harder to do than you might think. It takes a great deal of creativity as well as practicality. My older daughter consistently won. It was amazing! She turned out to be the most creative with the $5 limit.

Try Christmas shopping at a mall these days with a $5 limit for each person on your list. Don’t mention your limit to the clerk. Browse around, choose, and bring your purchase to the cash register. I still have (and use) the pill splitter I got from my older daughter one year. Today, there are dollar stores, making the $5 limit less challenging.

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I was brought up in Jewish neighborhoods. The Jewish kids couldn’t understand the magic of Christmas, but they liked it. My folks would put candy canes on our tree. When the parade of Jewish children visited, each was allowed to pick a candy cane off the tree to take home.

I didn’t appreciate how hard our lavish Christian Christmas traditions were for Jewish kids til a standup comedian joked: you mean all I got was this stupid dreidel?

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Christmas ‘48
From a Kid’s Eye View

My birthday is on December 21st, so I was called a Christmas baby. Christmas morning was always filled with surprises and new toys. The year my brother got a Lionel train set was pure magic. I sat for hours listening to the locomotive’s whine as it carried the cars over a bridge and through the tunnel with a bright red caboose following.

The year when I turned eight, I got a doll for Christmas. It was not the Sparkle Plenty doll with the flowing blond hair I secretly wished for but a beautiful baby doll with red corduroy overalls. I loved her immediately, and Sparkle Plenty faded from my young memory.

This was also the strangest Christmas of my young life. This Christmas morning, all the grown-ups were sad. Mommy was very sad. It wasn’t anything like past Christmas mornings. My older brother and sister knew not to make too much noise. I followed their lead, but it was hard. I was so excited about my new baby doll with the red overalls.

Uncle Joey, Mommy’s younger and only brother, was near death. As he clung to life, my parents suppressed their grief and made Christmas for us children.

It’s no lie to say that Uncle Joey was my favorite uncle. He was handsome and funny. We all loved him, grown-ups and kids alike. Uncle Joey was the apple of Grandma’s eye. He could play Peg O’My Heart on Grandma’s upright. We would all sing along. He knew how to put a roll of paper with square holes into the piano door; then the piano played and played with no one sitting at the piano bench.

Then the war came – World War II. Uncle Joey became a Marine. He fought the “Japs” in hand-to-hand combat during WWII. I remember that expression: hand-to-hand combat. As a kid, I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded scary and gruesome.

Uncle Joey was especially handsome in his Marine uniform. Daddy had an automobile, so we all got to go on the ride to pick Uncle Joey up from Grand Central Station when he was on leave and could visit us. There he was, smiling and waving. It was pure heaven when I was assigned to sit between his knees. Everything was fun and exciting when Uncle Joey visited. Grandma and Mommy and Aunt Sally were very happy, too. One time, Uncle Joey brought a coconut to Grandma’s house. It was a ceremony to get the coconut open. We kids each got a turn drinking coconut milk and eating coconut meat. It was the best coconut milk and coconut meat I had ever tasted.

Finally, the war was over. It was a memorable occasion for a kid. We were allowed to go up on the roof of our apartment building and throw paper strips down to the street. Grown-ups picked us kids up so we could peer over the ledge at the solid sheet of flying paper. The grown-ups were banging pots and pans. They were screaming in happiness and joy. It looked to us kids like the grown-ups had gone crazy – but a happy crazy.

After the war, Uncle Joey could not settle back into his old job and his old life. He became more and more distant toward those who loved him. After the violence of the war, there was only one thing he felt comfortable doing: carrying a firearm to protect and serve his country. He joined the New York City Police Department.

But, according to Mommy, he was never really her brother again. Uncle Joey had become a stranger…moody, tortured, restless. He began to drink heavily, and he drank himself into a stupor repeatedly. The carefree, smiling, joking son, brother, uncle, husband, father, and friend we all knew and adored was gone…gone forever.

Why then, in the Christmas of ’48, was my beloved Uncle Joey – my favorite uncle – lying in a hospital bed close to death?

After a few years as a policeman, Uncle Joey was home alone one fine day. He took out his service revolver, put it to his temple, pulled the trigger, and blew his brains out.

Oh, I’m sorry. Was that too graphic? I’ll try to be gentler next time. It’s just that I have a problem softening the description of the brutality of war and the victims left in its path.

Was Uncle Joey’s death the result of unspeakable things he saw and did in defense of our country? Of course it was. Have we learned anything since WWII? Apparently not.

In 2003, the US invaded a sovereign country for one and only one reason: OIL. Oil to enrich fat, arrogant old men. Evil old men who had plans to steal Iraq’s oil before infiltrating our government and wreaking havoc with America’s treasury and its fighting men and women.

Do you remember this administration sending trial balloons til it hit on a plausible reason for taking us to war? Saddam is a bad man, we were told, he treats his people badly. Why didn’t that bother our senses all the years Saddam let the oil run freely (and cheaply) into our country? When our current Defense Secretary used to smile warmly for the camera while shaking hands with the monster?

Is our plan for Iraq more sinister? Does it have to do with the 14 bases the US is building there? If we are to follow this administration’s logic, America will constantly be at war. We will have an endless mission to find “evildoers” and “destroy” them. We will be the self-appointed policemen of the universe. We will do this sans red cape, big “S” on chest, and ability to fly. We will do this with the army we have, not the army we want.

Body armor…you want it? Buy it yourself!

Museum of Antiquities? Screw that – no OIL there. So what if it gets looted and all the artifacts, relics, memories, and recorded history of the world are lost or destroyed in the process? So what if fewer than a half-dozen of our troops could have been deployed there to preserve the history of civilization and its Mesopotamian cradle? We don’t control that – they're free now, free to do as they please. Anarchy? We hadn't thought of that. We're watching the oil for them! We can't do everything.

Let's check with Pat Robertson.

Pat Robertson and his ilk will tell us there is no such thing as “7,000 years ago” – the Earth didn’t even exist according to fundamentalist Christians' reckoning of time and history. And Bush? The Republicans? Hold onto your knickers! Their only concern is pandering to the rich, the corporations, and the fundamentalists…the rest of us be damned.

But what about the violence and the death and destruction – the Iraqi death toll – caused by the invasion? Didn’t American troops use white phosphorous in Fallujah? Are they still using it on civilians all over Iraq?

White phosphorous burns the flesh off the human body. That includes women, children, and, yes, FETUSES! But they're not American fetuses, so I guess it's okay.

And I'm sorry to report that Iraq is merely the first country to be invaded by this evil administration. We don’t know the rest of its agenda.

The war in Iraq has left broken hearts, shattered lives, and seriously wounded veterans. There is no end in sight. We had better get used to it.

Will we support our veterans? Proposed budget cuts for veterans’ benefits by this administration make it unlikely. This government is fixated on cutting taxes for the rich. Period. There is no limit to its GREED.

Our government sent our soldiers to war in a country where we had no understanding of the people, geography, customs, or religious beliefs. There is no excuse for our blatant disregard and disrespect.

Have we learned nothing?