This is the subtle underlying message children will integrate, and just one part of the reason why so many people can so easily ignore or justify starving children and the suffering of others . 'It is karma' or 'they have to learn a lesson', "they were bad children this year" - this is the result of religious thinking, existent even within non-religious people, simply because they have been impulsed the message as well since their childhoods.
Cesar pointed out the obvious fact that Jesus, who's birthday we are supposedly celebrating, would not be happy with how we are going about celebrating his life and death. He would be incredibly angry in fact, and we may see the Jesus that is full of wrath, the one that flips the tables of the money changers and wreaks havoc on those living words that cause massive suffering, if he were to come back to this.
Gian interpreted the words 'Santa Claus' a little differently, perhaps a little more accurately, as 'Satan's Claws'. Cesar painted an image for me, of 'satan' standing over humanity with strings tied to his claws, with the ends of the strings tied to all the children as he controls them like puppets. And he is right, because as the story goes, only good little children get gifts on christmas day. Parents will use this as a threat, instead of understanding the child's behaviour, they will threaten them with a lump of coal and no gifts, creating compliant little robots that do not seek to understand themselves and direct their behaviour from a starting point of doing what's best for themselves and others - they instead learn to act for rewards - no principle, no understanding how reality and how relationships function, no questioning 'the way things are'.
It's no wonder society is disfunctional and uncaring - we are celebrating evil, normalizing rewarding those who have the most in the world by giving them even more. Cutting down millions of trees - the life giving beings that have been known by man to have their own 'intelligence' and a dynamic interconnected role in the ecosystem, as has been proven by science in modern times - which require TIME to create that dynamic interconnectedness - where you can't simply plant them every year and expect them to reestablish their balance in one year's time. Or we buy plastic trees, creating more waste to use for one day, mining the earth of its resources, only to throw them back to the earth in a form that nature cannot re-use.
I watched a video recently, it was made by a mother who was explaining how her son told her that Christmas felt "different" this year, like something was 'off'. She wanted to defend the 'Christmas spirit' by saying that they had done all the 'right' things; they got the tree, strung the lights, decorated the house, sang the songs and ate the food... yet she couldn't bring herself to speak, because she agreed, Christmas felt wrong. Wisdom comes "out of the mouths of babes" (Psalms 8:2).
It felt to me like someone else was finally seeing! Yes, Christmas is wrong! It is not good! Besides the points I mentioned above, it is also a time where people spend money they don't have buying things they don't need, buying things for children that will lose interest in them within months or weeks or even days. It is a time of heightened stress, loneliness and suicide for those living outside the 'bubble' we so enjoy. Go watch 'A Bad Mom' s Christmas' and you'll see an underlying truth, kids just want their parents to be present with them not stressed out, distracted, busy, and focusing on material presents - that is the wrong kind of present.
Kids LEARN to want material things. Cesar is the living proof that you can raise a kid to not focus on excess materialism. He becomes ANGRY if you get him a gift he doesn't need. He finds it wasteful. He demands that you KNOW HIM, and if you are to buy him something, it better be relevant to what he is interested in at that time and built to last. We bring him into the shops and tell him to buy anything he wants, and he will buy one lollipop to enjoy in the car on the way home, because he does not know lack, he doesn't know greed. He doesn't stuff our cart full of candies, sweets and toys, even though we have given him full permission to. He knows he will get what he needs when he needs it, because that is how we focus our resources. This is to show that you don't need to create an entire experience around Christmas, and try to get your kids to like you and love you and smile by buying gifts, playing music and putting up decorations. This should be a full-time living PRESENCE and tending to the children's needs every day.
I would suggest this to be everyone's last Christmas. To stop celebrating consumerism, to stop mining the earth, to simplify your life immediately, ridding yourself of everything that causes you to cope with life instead of living life, because we are all coping really.
So yes, Christmas should feel 'off' this year. It should have felt 'off' for a very long time now, but the brainwashing goes deep and we still want to hang on and believe there is still some value in it. Soon it will be the new year and we will feel as though there is newness, when there is in fact only sameness. FEEL that sameness so that you can see what actually needs to change.
Stop celebrating in this way, start starving corporations instead of starving your fellow man. Start dancing with your family randomly on a Tuesday instead of dancing on the graves of the slaves that made your Christmas sweater that you wear as a joke, where you express merriment once a year while you cover up the stress, the conflict between family, the suppression you live with daily.
I know my words are not nice, because IT is not nice. I have stopped celebrating, I refuse to participate, yet you see in my posts everyday that I am not a miserable Grinch. I strive every day to express me and make the best life for my children. I enjoy what I have and am content with it. A smile on Cesar's face because he built his confidence after his father spent weeks with him pushing, is worth a million times more than a smile from a gift we spent weeks worth of money on.
At this point, we can no longer just redefine Christmas or pick and choose some part that we justify as 'ok to do'. Doing that still impulses the entire construct that is Christmas, so that those that are completely lost and deliberately blind themselves to the bigger picture can continue business as usual. It's time to become a little more disruptive than that. Don't buy a tree, don't decorate, don't buy gifts. If you want to spend time with your family because this happens to be the time of year where you get time off work, then celebrate with your family sober - sober from the intoxication of false festiveness. Sit down together and have a real conversation about what you would really like from each other, for each other, and for the rest of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment