Shopping for Christmas

I've been back in NYC for the better part of a week, spending the holidays with friends and family, as it should be. A Latin friend of mine made a comment about how differently Americans celebrate Christmas and the holidays versus how his people celebrate back home. He was very polite, but I think what he meant was that we are so focused on shopping and retail and expectations, while back in his country, family just show up with food, wine and guitars and sing, drink, eat and dance the holidays away, and gifts aren't part of the identity of Christmas. This Christmas I didn't really shop for gifts. Instead I have tried to get together with people and have dinner or just time together. I was on 5th Ave, the retail capital of the western world 2 days before Christmas, and I couldn't identify one single person that looked like they understood the meaning of Christmas. At the moment of that realization I remembered the employee that got killed opening the doors of the Walmart on black Friday. It all hit me like a slap in the face and in a moment I realized clearer than ever that we, as a culture, have completely derailed. The things that aren't important have become our Gods. We give lip service to spirituality and religion, but greed and selfishness has become our spiritual principles. I think about animals in the wild. Do any other mammals commit suicide? Perhaps we have created a construct for ourselves that is so far from our true nature that it is impossible to achieve any lasting happyness or contentment by f0llowing the rules of the masses. And what about that man who committed suicide when he realized that he lost billions in the Madoff scam? It can't be any clearer. Our God is money and our religion, Greed, and when we lose that, we lose everything. It's beginning. The same thing that happened after the crash of '29. Bankers and investors throwing themselves out of windows because they have lost "everything." Today the New York Times announced on the front page that "Holiday Sales" were down 8% this year. That's big news. But what's bigger news is that such a statistic is so important to us as Americans that it made it on the front page of our biggest, most respected newspaper. What does that say about us as a people? I didn't see a metric for Holiday Spirit, but I wonder if anyone would care whether that went up or down even if there was such a metric.

I am hopeful that we have a president-elect that seems to understand that the direction of this country needs to be changed radically. But I think that our failings as a society go so far beyond Iraq and the Stock Market crash (see, I capitalized the "S" and the "M"...i didn't even realize it until after I had typed it!!) that he will merely be trying to fix the symptoms of a deeper cancer. Our values are so upside down that unless we can change them so completely, this society is doomed for complete failure.