My Anti-Christmas Message

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Due to a few errant and upset emails, let me state this is not an attack on the spirit of Christmas. Just the excessive commercialism that has developed. 



My normal sense of optimism and good humor that I maintained for most of my life has largely been overridden during this time of the year. However, I do remember a time, even as an adult, I welcomed the change in seasons and looked forward to the approaching holidays to be with family and friends. Now, while family and friends remain, this time of the year seems spoiled and tarnished where we are inundated with hysterical commercialism earlier each year equating love and friendship with material goods.  

I cannot really pick a specific time when things went bad and I am sure it is different or nonexistent for others. But for me there just seems to be some hazy point where we crossed a line and the holidays became less a celebration and more a business equation with the fate of the nation hanging in the balance. Now understand, I am not against capitalism but around the last week in August the commercials take on a panic-stricken nature determined to get the American consumer motivated into going deeper in debt.

For example, we are shown saccharin sweet couples confirming their love with the exchange of some diamond jewelry or cute children engrossed in the newest toy as their parents look on joyfully, both commercials more than slightly associating their products with happiness. The sad truth in all this is we have become so dumbed down that many do associate love and caring with items that many times end up forgotten in some box on the nightstand or abandoned in a closet.  If that was the extent of what I see as the problem I could ignore it, Hell in truth I am guilty of the same thing in many ways but we have gone far beyond just wanting to buy love and happiness,

The land of the free and home of the brave has become a nation of mall zombies who are more than willing to trample anyone who falls under foot as the local retail outlet opens up for Black Friday rush.  The national infrastructure can fall apart, the American high school dropout rate can be a global embarrassment, and young men and women can die in a war that no politician can justify other than for political reasons and that is just some boring story on the half-watched nightly news.  But goddamm it Americans will get excited about a freaking two-hundred dollar laptop at Wal-Mart to the point there is a near riot in the last few minutes before the store opens.

The final question I will leave you with is one that hit me like a ton of bricks in the video. If we will trample each other to death in the best of times for ultimately meaningless items how will we act if we ever find the store shelves empty of food?

I don’t buy the entire message of the video, the guy who made it wants to “save the republic.” If our country has become this, and by all evidence it has, I want no part of this strange Amerika whose only purpose is idle consumption and moronic behavior and whose existence only serves some corporate bottom-line.