Is it all right to be happy over a holiday that has “Happy” in its name?
The genocide of a long-suffering people to which our purported leaders have made us accomplices, a senile president who leaves us living with the danger of a nuclear conflict, fear and want and disorder everywhere you look: Can we allow ourselves happiness? Can we permit ourselves merriment in a few short weeks? And the most pressing query of all: What are we supposed to do? We must act, but how?
As another holiday season begins, I merely repeat questions many millions among us have asked for more than a year now. I know this because I recently conducted an extensive survey indicating that the world as we have made it leaves us, we Americans and other dwellers in the Western post-democracies, a chronically troubled people.
I made sure the poll covered a wide geographic spread: I surveyed my household; the respondents were two, including myself. So let us not argue: The results are unambiguously representative. I found frustration at a record level, and there must be a record somewhere. I found suggestions of anger and despair. I found that the questions just noted were posed not quite incessantly, but nearly. The survey’s margin of error is zero.
We are a perplexed people apart from everything else we are. And our questions are the very most right questions a troubled and perplexed people ought to ask as 2024 draws to a close and year-end holidays are upon us.
In mid–December a year ago, we were guests in the home of one of my kindly editors. This was in the village of South Egremont, at the southern end of the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. There was a tree at the foot of the stairs, the fire was lit, there were drinks on the coffee table. The kindly editor, the KE, stood before the tree with a glass ornament in her hand. We were about to begin the decorate-the-tree ritual.
Then the KE paused and turned. “Should we be doing this?” she asked. I vividly recall the unsettled look on her face. “Should we be celebrating?”
Israel was then several months into its sadistic barbarism in Gaza, and the government that is supposed to represent us but no longer does was profligately sustaining the Zionist regime’s terrorizing troops. There was no misunderstanding the KE’s question.
“Yes!” I replied with alacrity and not much reflection. There are moments when you understand your thoughts only when you speak them to others. And so I continued, “We must insist on honoring the feasts that matter to us. Celebration: We can’t surrender it. We owe it to ourselves to refuse the temptation of learned helplessness and despair.”
I paused. Then: “But that’s not the most important thing. We owe it most of all to the people of Palestine. It is for them we must demonstrate that the human spirit lives despite all, and that humanity’s shared capacity for joy is not extinguished.”
The KE nodded. I seem to have brought her around.
The KE’s son, a 30–something with a lightning wit and a quick, acute intelligence, considered the point carefully. His name is Stephen. After a moment Stephen said, “Yes, but a conscious ‘Happy’ and ‘Merry.’ A knowing ‘Happy’ and ‘Merry,’ a ‘Happy’ and ‘Merry’ that are fully aware—that refuse to avert their eyes, refuse to lose sight of anything.”
It was the best thing anyone said that evening. We decorated the tree just as these things always and wonderfully go: Put that silver bulb here. No, up a little. Now to the left. The pine cones should be in the front. The big red one goes on that side….
Stephen’s thought has stayed with me ever since. In a certain way I have lived by it.
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In 1934, Dorothy Day began to keep a diary. Day had by that time made her now-famous commitment to Catholicism and social action and was no stranger to street demonstrations, picket lines, hunger strikes, and jail cells. She was also an accomplished journalist. A year earlier she had founded The Catholic Worker—a newspaper, I am pleased to report, that still comes out bimonthly. Day kept her diary until her death in 1980. She called it The Duty of Delight. Marquette University Press published a hardcover edition in 2008.
Dorothy Day knew all about the violence, disorder, and suffering that seem always rampant in modern life. She spent her life countering injustice of all kinds, and she is widely remembered today for her exemplary dedication. Her journal is, if I do not unduly simplify, the story of her struggle never to let the ugliness and pain defeat her. Let me try that again: never to forget all that is fine or of enduring beauty. Maybe she would say, never to fall from grace. And here’s the thing: Dorothy Day kept a diary because this was a daily struggle, and, as she well understood, it was essential to the biggest struggle of all, the struggle for the human cause.
Craig Murray published a piece in Consortium News last August under the headline “We Are the Bad Guys.” In it he recounted his gradual awakening, beginning while he was serving as a British ambassador in Central Asia, to the world as we have it. After some years Murray explained, “I have now finally shed the last of my illusions.”
He then elaborated:
I am obliged to acknowledge that the system of which I am a part—call it ‘the West,’ ‘liberal democracy,’ ‘capitalism,’ ‘neoliberalism,’ ‘neo-conservatism,’ ‘imperialism,’ ‘the New World Order’— call it what you will, in fact it is a force for evil.”
The shedding of illusions, for anyone who has any and most of us do, is an essential first step on the way to living a responsible life. It is when we are “dis-illusioned,” it seems to me, that we become capable of acting in ways that have meaning. Acting is essential if we are to keep our souls alive—and if we are to celebrate consciously, as my friend Stephen put it, or to fulfill our duty to delight, as Ms. Day put it.
A lot of people, to put a very obvious point as mildly as I can, do not want to lose their illusions. They are, indeed, highly dependent on them. And in this they are incessantly encouraged, mauled daily with illusions, by those who pose as our leaders and by the clerks and secretaries in the media who serve these poseurs. These kinds of people, illusioned people, are pretty good at celebrating. But there is no honoring or respecting them. There is no pretending their souls are still alive.
“We resist our own governing systems, or we are complicit,” Ambassador Murray wrote in that Consortium News commentary recounting his awakening. Ten words: I do not think our shared circumstance can be described any more plainly than this. And as if he anticipated the question this thought instantly raises, the “how” question, Murray put this to his readers this at the end of what amounts to a confessional essay:
The paths of resistance are various, depending where you are. But find one and take one.
I am no more inclined than Craig Murray to write a shopping list of the paths each of us may choose. Finding one’s own is part of the project. It may come to making protest placards out of shirt cardboards and standing on the village green. I read now there is renewed interest in war-tax resistance of the kind we saw during the Vietnam war. Let us bear witness one or another way. This seems to me the beginning of any path. Bearing witness was a big part of Dorothy Day’s work, if you think about the time and great effort she put into The Catholic Worker even when she had a lot of other things to do.
Someone close to me is now in the West Bank. And among the many things she tells me, the most remarkable are the things Palestinians do amid the sadistic attacks of terrorizing Israeli troops and settlers—the nightly raids, the bombs, the brutalizing of children, the theft of land, and on and on. In their villages and towns Palestinians build kindergartens, make films, and fashion jewelry. They weave colorful fabrics, they blow glass, they study for degrees, they tend olive groves, they run museums.
I listen to these stories and realize these are paths of resistance. They are refusals. And then I see that refusals are celebrations of the very finest kind.
