Love…thy will be done

There’s a beautiful fullish moon in the sky, just in time for the winter solstice. The snow we were promised a while back never came, but there’s still a chance we’ll get a white Christmas; maybe just an inch, a few centimeters of snow, but a crisp and clean backdrop all the same.

How do you intend to spend the next two weeks, dearest denizens? On the road? In a onesie? Omicron is threatening to gatecrash every home, workplace, and community, and governments, city fathers, mothers, and second cousins will have no choice but to reinstate restrictions and lockdowns in the hopes of buying time and saving lives. It’s the ghost of Christmas past in a new robe.

How much more? How much longer? How are we supposed to cope? I wish I knew, sweetie darlings. All I know is we can’t give in to the anger and frustration so many of us are feeling, and for valid, perfectly understandable and human reasons. One of the side effects of Covid seems to be the erosion of manners. And I know it’s always something, always has been. O tempora! O mores! Rock ‘n’ roll corrupted the boomers, television ruined my generation, and social media is messing with the next, all who dare participate, really. That’s the narrative. But it’s not without a kernel of truth.

A certain amount of entitlement seems to go hand in hand with the equality social media and comparable platforms provide, and where there’s entitlement there’s always the drive to have the last word, and where there’s a drive to have the last word there’s the temptation to view others as not so equal anymore but as inferior should they not listen and agree, and that temptation breeds another, the need to ridicule, hurt and humiliate. Is that the loop so many seem to be caught in at the moment, screaming at strangers, quarreling with acquaintances, severing ties and burning bridges?

I know I have felt anger and frustration, oh so many times, over the past twenty-two months. It’s a valid, perfectly understandable and human reaction. You’d have to be Jesus himself to put up with what life keeps throwing at you and never for a fleeting second think that fuck this shit, I’m done. Done with people; what a bunch of unthinking and unfeeling morons.

Never met Jesus, not sure I ever will, but I hear he hated on no one, at most reprimanded hypocrites and greedy bastards. We have no problem hating on people we don’t know and will never meet. Since it’s Christmas (even if you don’t observe it) why not do as Jesus did and try to love (or at the very least listen to and try to understand) people you don’t know and will never meet. It’s a tad harder than dismissing and despising them when you don’t see eye to eye, but we have so many issues to deal with, so many problems to solve, and it would make everything go faster and that much smoother if we did it together. I know it’s a lot to ask, I know I fail at it all the time, but I’m trying. Give it a try with me? It’s almost Christmas, and on Christmas you get to make a wish, and this is mine.