I hadn’t thought this blog would be the most difficult one I’d have to write since beginning dontfearyourfreedom last Easter, but it’s stumped me for days. In October, a year-and-a-half after I lost my beloved Huckleberry to advanced kidney disease secondary to thread worm infestation and feline AIDS for which he had no risk factor (other than repeated vaccination) that, curiously, no veterinarian would diagnose properly, I lost another beautiful little soul to very similar diseases under the exact same circumstance. Huck’s little brother was repeatedly bioassaulted, just as was Huck, even after I treated him for roundworm when his vet refused to acknowledge his moth-eaten coat was abnormal, telling me his bald patches were because of his bristle tongue, which prompted me to wonder why all cats weren’t bald. A gang of veterinarians aided in the murder of these darling spirits, as unique as any individual person – and more so. It’s been a difficult few months, to say the least, and I find little reason to anticipate a different type of holiday, or 2010. But perhaps I am mistaken.
As is my yearly Christmas custom, I’ve been re-reading and thinking about the Sermon on the Mount, the most famous of Jesus’ homilies – the one in which he gave us a prescription for creating the Kingdom of G_d – and I realized once again that the magic of Christmas is that each of us can redeem ourselves by following his instruction to love G_d with all our minds, hearts and bodies (so we have maximum opportunity to realize that G_d is most assuredly not some paternalistic idol in the sky whose domain is outer space, or the afterlife, but actually, right here, right now) and to treat each other as we, ourselves, each wish to be treated. So the theme of my blog today, Christmas eve, is this: instead of forcing your, what is by nature, limited understanding of God down the throats of others and denigrating them because they don’t belong to the same religious gang that you do; instead of padding your Christmas savings club with graft you receive by informing on your neighbors like a Third Reich SS; instead of coveting your new Andersen windows and aluminum siding more than the freedom and dignity of neighbors about whom you concoct slander that makes her the subject of the FBI’s TIPS investigation and surveillance by your so-called neighborhood watch; instead of treating other human beings as a means to your ends, remember that it is these very sins for which Jesus died – the slander, contempt and dispassion in which the general public then held the prophet and for which they said, when Pontius Pilate asked them which prisoner would receive amnesty from crucifixion, ‘not Jesus.’
What a Christmas miracle it would be if those of you who’ve been running around spending your bribes on mind-numbing, soul-killing, violent video games for your kids -- to anesthetize them to the horror that is the fascism in which our country now exists and delude them into believing that distraction is better than conscious action that changes the status quo so that some day they may not be the slaves we all are today – stopped and reflected on the fact that Jesus’ message was truly the antithesis of, and cure for, fascism. That you do so on more than just one day a year – which is something Jesus himself believed was truly within the power of each of us to do – is my sincerest wish today. May the light of a thousand blessed stars of Bethlehem inspire in you the courage to act as that babe in the manger would wish you to act each and every day for the rest of your life.
Merry Christmas.
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