Not last year’s. The one coming: it may be the last time we will recognize our country as we have known it. What might Christmas 2026 look like? Lest we reverse the nonsense that rattled the prior Yule, “the times they are a-changin’” may take a very nasty turn.
Our illustrious president, drooling over visions of Nobel-ian sugarplums, took over the Kennedy awards and hosted the event in all his glory, an emperor brandishing a ramrod fashioned for him by Congress and the Supreme Court.
Where did the world go, the one we used to live in? Certainly things change. Change is inexorable but best when organic, in ways that make sense with the past as a connector to the future.
Regressive change, regrettably, is like a bull in a china shop: all that is beautiful is broken and irreplaceable. The result is but loss and destruction. Those going along with the present hijack of democracy in no way voted for it, if honest with themselves. Their vision was but Conservatism 2.0 and a slap and finger-wag in the face of hated liberals.
What we all got was a series of hangings—personal and political destruction of competitors now deemed enemies. Political trials. Invasion of great cities, pitting law enforcement against itself. Thugs in masks authorized to snatch innocents from streets, shear them of family and shunted to god-knows-what countries without due process. Books now banned may soon be books burned while free speech dies in the ashes of darkness.
Those who wanted this will face similar music, for today’s politics are more than a discordant note; it’s a tsunami of sacrilege and they too will learn that, having seen others’ necks in the noose, their turn will come and none will be left to stand up or speak for them–unless they bend the knee of course–and that’s not freedom, that’s enslavement. And it ain’t pretty.
Be amazed at the monsters of another day—and dare not walk away without its lessons. Rome lost its republic and we may lose ours. The midterm elections are portentous and our last best chance for democracy to show the power of its resilience. Not by violence or force but a test of this remarkably ingenious way in politics and governance.
To say that monsters are only in children’s books and in strange adult fantasies of undead brain-eaters is to mock history. I leave it to the reader to use that yardstick to determine who else bears the marks, You may not have far to look, and not only between here and the Middle East. If free people who love their freedom can love its absence too, and the reasons are known only to god, somebody please get next to the big guy and find out why.
History doesn’t ensure what will happen but what can happen. The boomerang effect is thinking we’ve thrown something away but it returns with a smack in the kisser. That we don’t want something to happen doesn’t mean it won’t.
To be sure, enjoy the holidays. They are diverse in meaning and in manner of celebration, but their common symbol is light, recalling ancient peoples who thought the sun was going away, never to return, leaving them “the people lost in darkness.” But it did return and was worshipped for doing so. That’s the real “reason for the season.”
The light of our time in this dark world is democracy. And we continue to forge morals and ethics so that tooth-and-nail instincts will not be sole means of survival. Whoever turns back the clock on that will bring us to a time we surely don’t want to live in again.
Happy Holidays, but take long, sober note of what you’re looking at. It may be the last Christmas you’ll recognize. The next one may be hell to pay.
John Burciaga is a direct descendant of one E. Scrooge. Rail at his Bah, Humbugs at Ichabod142@gmail.com.