Numbering The Days

     Eleven days to go until we commemorate the birth of the Son of God in human flesh. Eleven days more before we break out in choruses of “Adeste Fideles” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and start ripping the gaily covered paper off the packages under the tree. Eleven more days to imagine what He would think of the mess we’ve made – and are making – of this world.

     The majority of us call ourselves Christians. We call Him whom we follow the Prince of Peace. Yet strife is among us and around us, and peace is a stranger. We could have peace, were we to choose it. Yet we prefer to squabble, to exchange insults, epithets, and blows.

     It’s unnatural. Sane people prefer peace to war, harmony to conflict. The majority of us are sane, aren’t we? Why, then, do we fight? What is driving us to it?

     Yes, it’s rhetorical question.

     Forgive me, Gentle Reader. I’m “in a mood,” and it’s hard not to let it express itself. It doesn’t help to encounter an article such as this:

     Google just can’t help itself. The multinational tech giant has perverted Christmas. Google is promoting a Christmas ad with a man who says he identifies as a non-existent thing called nonbinary. He dresses as a woman. It’s a fetish. And Google has embraced it.
     The man’s name in the Google commercial is Cyrus Veyssi, and apparently, he’s become some sort of massive influencer, the new celebrity status, thanks to social media.

     This week, Google released a new Christmas advertisement featuring a male influencer who identifies as “non-binary.”
     The ad featured Cyrus Veyssi, 30, who has over 600,000 followers on TikTok and more than 500,000 followers on Instagram. In the ad, he is wearing women’s clothing and complaining about his skin. – Townhall

     The commercialization of Christmas, however anyone feels about it, is an accomplished fact. More attention goes to shopping and present-giving than to the birth of Christ, even though His title is right there in the name of the holiday. Now the biggest player in Big Tech has decided to inject more of this transgender lunacy – arguably the most divisive of all the contentions being hawked at us today – into the festivities. Division instead of the unity and joy Christmas is supposed to bring us! How much lower could we possibly sink?

     Ursula Le Guin wrote memorably about the work of the fomenters of division and degradation:

     He sat down, and neither spoke. A golden beam slid imperceptibly up through the air of the room as the sun’s end of it slid down towards the quiet plowlands west of Aisnar. She saw his face through a dust of gold. He had been a handsome man, when they married, fourteen years ago. A handsome, happy man, proud and kind, very good at his work. There had been a splendor to him, a wholeness.
     That was gone. There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain.

     It’s of a piece with the relentless attempts by “those who have not joy” to destroy all that is sound, beautiful, and true. We are being stripped of all the supports to peace, wholesome pleasures, and good will toward men. They are unceasing. They have a definite aim: power. And like a Terminator, they will not stop.

     They must be stopped. But who is working to stop them?

     I dislike feeling this way. If there’s an antidote, it must be to surround oneself with as much festivity and good cheer as possible. Just now, for reasons of which I must not speak, that’s very hard.

     The usual reaction to division and provocation is fury: to lash out, to strike, smash, and shatter. Sometimes, that reaction is the right one. At other times, it advances the aims of the dividers. And we cannot know a priori which is which.

     It’s dangerous to provoke an old man to fury. As he ages, life in prison looks like ever less of a deterrent. But people come to me daily with their sorrows, and I have no more balm for their wounds than I have for my own.

     Eleven more days.