'Mother-F**king' is simply another way of saying 'incestuous eco-fornication'...

I’m a godless heathen pagan, according to some of my friends. I don’t celebrate Christmas (or any other ‘joyful’ season that represents faith-based hope in earning some deity or other’s eternal blessings). The only real deity I believe in is Mother Earth and one of the nice things about her is that she usually doesn’t demand fervently worshipful obeisance as a requisite for holding off on fusillades of pestilence and hellish brimstone (read: catastrophic natural disasters, et al). Rather, she commands respect and deserves consideration by example (like any other nurturing female). Sadly, parent abuse has been a recurrent factor in the affairs of humanity since our earliest strayings from the primal slime-mold pool. Consequently, not listening to ‘Mom’ is commonly prevalent among the still-immature among us these days, since unlike Dad (who can and might just beat the holy pahootie out of you for being ‘difficult’), mom’s armamentarium of behavioral modification tools consists more of loving encouragements and supportive exhortations than swift (and forceful) kicks to one’s nether extremity.

But that’s my take on things. Everyone else apparently feels that if you mumble a few prayers periodically, gaze devoutly skywards now and then, attend a Christmas (or Chanukah) service once a year, and keep sending those tithing cheques to Reverend Billy-Bob’s ‘Save the African Children with Cleft Palates’ project, your sweet derriere is adequately covered by heavenly misfortune insurance for most untoward events. Meanwhile, soon as we’ve stopped wondering at Baby Jesus (or whomever) it’s back to business as usual, killing each other off, exploiting the unwise, and raping and plundering the environment to make personal fortunes without a thought for the salvation of the planet we all depend on for our survival.

At this time of the year, when just about everyone is merrily slaughtering living groves of trees (by the millions) to gaudily decorate their homes in ecologically bad taste, we are also near driven to distraction by media advertisements that suggest that exorbitant seasonal consumption is a patriotic act of unparalleled importance to our entire American way of life. At such moments, the whole nauseating schlock of ‘the holiday spirit’ thing is enough to send me to the local Home Depot to find some plywood sheets large enough to saw out the words ‘BAH HUMBUG’, so that I can string them with gaudy lights and prop them up on my roof as a jarring counterpoint to all the questionable-taste Christmas decorations the neighbors have visually polluted our neighborhood with.

OK, so hundreds of ‘poor’ families need Christmas baskets so their kids can celebrate a bit of the holidays. My immediate response is “WHY?” So they can all grow up to blindly follow the rest of our distorted culture in slavishly worshipping wasteful consumerism and spirit-sucking materialism as a national ethic? Sadly enough, ‘Christmas spirit’ has today become so commercialized, so madly hyped-up and marketed with philistine obsessiveness by corporations and for-profit private enterprise that there’s hardly any of the original ‘peace and good will to man’ left in any of it and I for one am sick to death of the whole thing.

Perhaps the worst aspect of our annual ‘holidays’ mania is the fact that once the ‘joy-filled’ holidays are over and done with, after all the strings of lights are taken down off the house and the dried-out husk of that formerly beautiful evergreen tree is tossed out in the street for removal, everything is back to (fu**k you and the horse you rode in on, buddy) status-quo again for the rest of the year. Of course no one, and I do mean no one, recognises the abysmally serial hypocrisy of this whole process, or if any one does, they lack the cojones (that ‘bollocks’ to you, bud) to stand up and heap shame on all the rest of us for failing to see through the self-deceit and ethical vapidity that underlies the whole process of annually thanking one’s favorite deity (by means of promises made well in advance, thank you very much) for future high-marks favor in Saint Peter’s heavenly roster.  As Berke Breathed’s character, Bill the Cat, once famously remarked while coughing up a philosophical hairball, “Ack!”

At this time of year, what has the most meaning for me is the miracle of planetary physics that have enabled the Winter Solstice.  I think that even Stephen Hawking would have to agree that the planetary circumstances and celestial interactions that together enable our planet to not only spawn reflectively intelligent life (the jury is still out on this popular hypothesis, however) but sustain it is probably a higher order of the miraculous than anything some Pontiff or High Priest can possibly conceive of. In fact, speaking of Hawking, he admits that his concept of god with a capital G is the Universe in all its infinite complexities; he stops short of saying that he despises ‘personalised’ gods that one can have a cozy, direct relationship with, but it’s clear enough between the lines of his writings. What Hawking is saying, of course, is that all of humanity believe in the same ‘god’….we simply disagree on what to call him/it/her. It all boils down to an insolvable problem in semantics, doesn’t it?...and certainly the differences in what we call this him/it/her thing by no means warrants or condones anyone killing anyone else for choosing to adhere to a different definition of that defining term.

It is to me worth recalling that I recently stumbled across part of a speech given by John Kennedy at the 1963 American University commencement speech (the speech was actually written by Kennedy’s masterful speech writer Ted Sorenson, of course) that truly puts our human challenge before us, as we continue to savage each other over differences in religious opinion, and madly continue to tear this beautiful world apart to convert it into corporate profits that only the already wealthy benefit from.

I’m tempted to say you can take all your religious ‘hope’, ‘faith’, and ‘belief’ and tuck it away where the sun don’t shine, Mabel, since all that mumbo-jumbo and religious juju will never effect the sort of critically needed change that Kennedy cited in that speech of his in 1963. Whether he personally and passionately believed his words or not is beside the point; the true essence of what he said remains with us today, as vital and important as ever. In his graduation address, he referenced the Soviet Union, since at that time the ‘Cold War’ was turning into a somewhat more than mad contest between two super-power cultures for survival, that of America and that of the Soviet Union. He remarked, accordingly, that America needed to think of the Soviets…and it was an admittedly radical thought at the time for most Americans…as human beings. “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this same small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And…we are all mortal.”

Don’t you think we’re well overdue to stop squabbling about whose god is better than any other? Don’t you feel we’re overdue to stop feeling homicidal flashes every time someone professes a different opinion on what it is that the Universe is actually all about? I do. On that note, and as the shortest day of the year approaches, you all have my most sincere wish for the preservation of some intellectual sanity among the highest-evolved opposable-thumb primates we all are and for a renewed recognition of the need for universal tolerance, respect and even…yes…peace for the entire world.

I probably shouldn’t have to remind you that Mother Nature just barely tolerates us Homo Sapiens and our disrespectful, destructive behavioral excesses as it is. Even nurturing, loving and supportive mothers have their limits of patience, so don’t f**k with Mother or eventually she might just decide to kick all our asses and start all over again with entirely new life forms that won’t pose such perpetually frustrating  problems!

Aloha mai e, Kalikiano