Today is the Ides of October. Cash registers are being engorged with payments for the treats and trappings of Allhallows Eve, the traditional Christian festival which precedes the commercial Saturnalia of Christmas. This year, as in years past, I can't have what I want for Christmas.
I want to be in an old-fashioned kitchen where the hard, diamond-bright light of an afternoon sun bouncing off fresh snow comes in through the windows. I want the warm air in the kitchen to be redolent with the perfume of freshly baked mince tarts. I want to sit in a chair with my feet on the open oven door of a coal and wood range while I plunge into the first chapter of His Majesty's Yankees, and O Little Town of Bethlehem is playing on the living room radio. It's an impossible longing. We can't go back.
In 2011, I have more than enough of this world's goods and there is no material thing that would be a suitable gift for loved ones who are more prosperous than their father.
Getting and spending is not what Christmas is truly about.
The essential Christian message is alive and well in the non-Christian monarchy of Bhutan. There they don't measure the gross domestic product. They measure gross domestic happiness. Their gauge of national success is in protecting the environment and in sharing with every citizen the abundance of the natural resources of the land. I would live there if I could. I would like to see that country endure as an example for the rest of the world, but I fear it will soon become a victim of the international oligarchy of wealth.
The occupy Wall Street movement, as yet leaderless and unfocussed, can find the centre of strongly entrenched forces of greed in its own land and the vision of a better world in little Bhutan.
How will history judge a supposedly civilized country, where mythology is history and national medicare is rejected by voters who believe so strongly in keeping government out of their lives? How will history judge the political forces that refuse to be their brothers' keeper? How will history judge legislators who believe that all citizens must stand on their own two feet, even if they are standing in snow and have no boots?
It is natural that the anti-Wall Street movement would target banks. Lenders have been cursed for a very long time. The warrior monks of the Knights Templar, permitted to practice usury, became so wealthy that the King of France, abetted by Pope Gregory, confiscated their treasures and then fried most of them at the stake, including their leader.
The destruction of the Templars was a triumph of the powerful. The long persecution of the Jewish moneylenders was the vengeance of the powerless.
But moneylenders are not at the heart of global problems. We are all in grave danger if there is no realization that the harvesting of food from land and water are the noblest of professions. The oligarchs know. Having grown obscenely rich on profits from the energy industry, they now intend to control the world's supply of food by buying control of land and water - including the water we presently obtain from municipal systems.
I hope the new wave of protestors will soon gain a clearer idea of the dangers which face the powerless masses. I hope their movement will grow and that it will bring about a new and less selfish global economy.
That would be the best present for Christmas in 2012.
