on the tube to kick off each New Year! This year on Monday, 9 a.m. in Edmonton.
That and the fantastic, annual New Year’s concert by the Vienna Philharmonic on PBS/ch. 22, Sunday, Jan. 1, 8 pm Edmonton time.
Great sights and sounds to kick off the new year!
amidst the current cold snap, this blog heads for its annual break of dormancy, hibernation and the more customary Christmas peace that one typically expects at this time of December.
I leave you with my usual Dylan Thomas Christmas eve meditation sign-off and an olde pic of my older grandson sleeping in my bedroom once-upon-a-much-happier-time:
“Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-coloured snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”
–Dylan Thomas, the conclusion of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”
reflecting the complaining, criticism, griping and bitching of the public everywhere on everything.
e.g., an MSNBC headline today:
Why Zelenskyy’s powerful speech likely failed in one important way
The message is: Always find something to criticize. Always look for potential flaws. Never just accept, just highlight the good points and intentions, and just praise.
Well, no one’s perfect, of course, and everyone makes mistakes. But there are always, in this age, going to be myriad trolls who just fault-find and criticize. Making those things de rigueur and par for the course for everyone about everything others do. In that, skewered obsession and blindness to the much and manifold good that people actually do and accomplish. This revealing a significant lack of appreciation which is very widespread and modern, unfortunately.
Trump has been accused of using copyrighted images in his NFT collection with fighter pilot outfit and cowboy costumes from Amazon and Walmart which have been photoshopped on to his trading cards.
Members of Twitter users and the media have pointed out that some of them look to be based on unlicensed, copyrighted photos.
In fact, many of the designs, including a spacesuit and a cowboy getup, have been seen previously on websites for clothing and stock photos.
Trump’s taxes as they were required to. Trump appointed the head of the IRS!
In any case, it’s amazing that he wasn’t challenged on the basis of his providing no supporting documents for his (wild) claims unlike the rest of us each year at tax time.
This evil, corrupt ‘genius’ was viewed as above everyone else by the IRS and its head, and given total carte blanche to make money illegally during his Reign of Terror.
For fearlessly telling the truth and testifying honestly to the Jan. 6 committee.
Thereby rejecting all the strong-arming and bribes she received from Trump and his army. Those are mighty long odds when you consider how large Trump’s army is.
But she chose good old-fashioned integrity (something very uncommon these days) and resisted what she called being “f****d” by her first (Trump) lawyer and the evil advice of Trumpian-corrupt others.
The single-most major, consequential, existential, life-affirming and ethical choice by any woman on the planet this year. A massive splash of positive change and a gong-ringing blow for truth amidst so much GOP corruption. (In terms of scale and magnitude, her choice is easily as significant as and right up there with Thomas More’s, for instance.)
We are witnessing a sudden, shocking, widespread decline in civility and civilization in people’s behaviors and countries relative to the harsh and destructive ways in which animals, pets, babies, young children, women, and other races are treated.
These barbaric, primitive, and evil ways reveal that, as a species, humans can quickly and dramatically revert and regress in the absence of empathy, sympathy, kindness, caring, respect, understanding, and appreciation of other beings and fellow creatures.
Laws and punishments continue to flag and even favor the so-called rights of offenders. Unmitigated, ongoing evil, in particular, must not go unpunished.
It is hard for many people who have common sense, reason, and an understanding of the role of true/real justice to understand and accept, therefore, why Trump and his aiders and abettors have been given a free pass to run amok freely and unlimitedly from any kind of reckoning and accountability.
When will that nation and its remaining institutions come to their senses and cleanse itself of all the Republican bold-faced corruption and evil which has nearly destroyed that country and its democracy?
“He who loses his life shall find it.”–quoted by Joseph Campbell
Two of the most inspiring Christmas movies ever are the Alistair Sim version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and Frank Capra’s movie It’s a Wonderful Life. They have inspired many generations of viewers with their simple, yet profound core messages about life.
Both show us the huge difference between (transitory, ephemeral, living) presence and (deathly, ghostly, forever) absence–or the extreme loss of presence. In the Dickens’ story, Scrooge comes to learn the hard way that absence can be a terrible point-of-no-return and that he has meanly absented himself from his family, his sister, her son, his fiance, his employee Bob Cratchit, and his business partner Marley. In his heartless, monolithic obsession with accumulating meaningless wealth, he has also alienated himself from whatever good qualities he once possessed or valued in the past.
It is only through realizing unchangeable, irrevocable absences like those of his dead sister, fiance, and Marley and by being given a glimpse of a future without Tiny Tim and himself, that he is able to reconnect with finer values of kindness, love, and generosity. These values, in turn, help him to reconnect positively with both society and his once-better self. In the world of A Christmas Carol, the only other alternative is grim, stark hopelessness, suffering, and death, as amply revealed by the three ghosts who visit Scrooge.
Scrooge’s final appreciation of presence and being alive become epiphany and reason enough for him to celebrate and re/connect with the social world. Though this change comes late in his life, Scrooge ‘magically’ finds that he can will any possibility into being with humor and a better attitude–key positive manifestations of both presence and consciousness.
Likewise, George Bailey, the main character in It’s a Wonderful Life, suddenly finds himself ‘lost’ and ‘gone missing’ in a way reminiscent of Scrooge, but, in contrast, he is truly a desperate man driven by crisis to the brink of suicide. The beginning of his salvation occurs at the bridge when he saves his drowning guardian angel Clarence. That event alone reveals George’s essential nature of putting others before himself, something he had previously done all his life.
Like Scrooge, he is shown life without his presence and an alternate nightmarish version of his own community–a negative view caused by his absence and his granted wish to never have been born. After a final repentance, George is given back his less-than-perfect life, grateful for the chance to recover both presence and life. Like Scrooge, his limited/limiting, blinkered attitude changes and he embraces life, with all its problems and shortcomings. That said, both protagonists find a richness through their experience and a renewed appreciation of presence and others. And as both characters discover, nearly anything becomes possible when one fully accepts and embraces life and presence.
Today we still hear that Christmas can be a stressful, isolating time of year for many individuals in our society. For those who may find themselves similarly ‘lost’ or ‘gone missing’, these two classics offer helpful perspectives on some of the ‘basics’ for finding or recovering purposeful meaning in one’s own life.
