Or
Let’s make the Holidays Great again by not passing the debt on to our kids.
The holidays we think of at this time of year , were actually celebrated thousands of years before any religions claimed them. Even to primitive life forms, sunlight means warmth and food. And just as surely, early humans noticed the sun’s motion and prepared for days with less sun, and looked forward to longer days when life re-emerged.
Civilization has made astounding progress in the last few hundred years, by capturing and using millions of years of stored sunlight. It has made us materially powerful but not any wiser.
In fact we are headed back into the climate that millions of years of capturing carbon took us out of. While many of us understand what is happening, the habits of extravagant energy consumption run deep in our lives, and in our built environment. Those habits even affect our responses to the changes we know are needed. This makes all of us passive bystanders as our civilization collides with the “climate tax”, climate refugees and the usual crisis carpet baggers.
As we face the changes ahead, we recall the stages of Grief (https://health.clevelandclinic.org/5-stages-of-grief):
Denial.
Anger.
Bargaining.
Depression.
Acceptance.
Whatever stage you find yourself on at any moment, realize that everyone else was on that energy binge and will be in one of those stages too. We were all victims and perpetrators, and we need to reach deep into our holiday spirit to help each other make it through the post-binge slump.
No wonder MAGA resonated with so many people: the era of “Great” came out of our children’s inheritance. This also explains the popularity of Jewish, Moslem and Christian Death Cults in these “Last Days” of our energy binge.
It will get easier as the deniers lose credibility but distractors and carpet-baggers are always there to turn social losses into personal profit.
Be generous but avoid the “Great Again” myth. We all had a good time, now we can clean up our mess, move on, and make way for the solutions of 2024 . The solutions must include care for the generations that will inherit what we leave behind.
It’s a great time to practice the holiday spirit that helps us all get through the lean times.
Happy Holidays!
Leave a Reply