Make A Wish

Dec. 18, 2015

It’s the season to dream. Children everywhere imagine the toys and treats on Christmas, yet parents walk a careful line. We want our children to have the joy of surprise and magical feelings of granted wishes. It’s a delight to watch young children discover gifts they never imagined. But there is a balance, and as our children grow and mature we work to transition them from getters to givers, to see the joy from the other side. Sometimes it’s a smooth transition, but sometimes the realization that there is no Santa is a difficult adjustment. Rarely, the transition never happens and some adults continue to look for Santa to meet their desires. Too many adults confuse the possibilities of their desires with the realities of the world.

The political culture has made an industry out of dreams. Traverse City’s current Christmas wish is that if we pretend there’s no traffic, it will go away. We have written “traffic calming” on our lists. But just as most kindergarteners don’t get the pony they want, traffic won’t go away if you paint it blue. We can restripe, redirect and obscure traffic, but as long as more people pass through, come into, and live downtown, traffic will increase. All the wishing won’t make it go away. This childish folly is locally expensive, and will increase traffic accidents, but in the big picture it’s nothing compared to some of our national dreams.

In the early 1960s Lyndon Johnson proposed “The Great Society,” a dream to end poverty in his lifetime. Politicians have been dining out on this impossible promise for more than 50 years. The United States embarked on one of the most expensive and failed Christmas gifts of all time. After 50 years of political promises, taxation, and income transfers, the poverty level hasn’t changed. We still hear “one in five American children face hunger.” That’s 20 percent of our kids hungry — despite free lunch and breakfast programs, and state programs — despite the fact that more than 46 million Americans receive food assistance payments. Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t money. Perhaps it’s parental neglect. It could be human nature that a certain percentage of the population can’t or won’t take care of themselves and their families. Maybe the dream of a poverty-free world isn’t possible. The war on poverty has been a financial and social disaster, but it hasn’t threatened our safety like some of our recent imaginings.

Gandhi is famous for peacefully leading the people of India to the sea to make salt in a protest of the British imposed salt tax (yes, The Mahatma was against taxation). His peaceful protest worked because India was facing the decent British Empire. The civilized British were not going to kill thousands of innocents to make their point. But the world’s evils are not embodied in the traditionally reasonable British, and Gandhi’s pacifism cannot be universally applied. Like the Christmas pony, it is a dream to assume that we can face all evil passively.

All of the headline mass slayings in the last several years have one thing in common. There were different killing methods and tools, different motivations, and a range of mental breakdowns. The common thread: In each case the victims were in “Gun Free” zones, by law, and unarmed. To a generation of adults who grew up never touching or seeing a gun it’s easy to demonize firearms. You could label a cap gun an assault weapon and they wouldn’t know the difference. Their ignorant fear can only be vanquished in a world without this scary monster under the bed. At the heart of this wish is the refusal to accept that it isn’t evil things, but bad people to be feared. Just as a certain number of people will end up in poverty, there has always been and will always be a few crazy, sociopathic, and horrible people. They will not be restrained by rules and laws. The social walls that bind our society will not hold these criminals without the reinforcement of good people bearing arms. Wishing will not make the world safer.

Just as Gandhi’s passivity has been overly applied, so has his success. Gandhi was able to free India from the British, but only after a Muslim land was created. “In August 1947, Britain granted independence, but the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two dominions, a Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan. As many displaced Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs made their way to their new lands, religious violence broke out.” Since 1947 Pakistan has been in constant turmoil, a demonstration that certain sects of one religion have a habit of violence. The final and most dangerous Christmas wish is our dream that all religions are peaceful.

We do not open our homes to every person who walks down the street. We do not invite the homeless to search through our refrigerators or sleep in our beds. We understand that there are limits to generosity. We lock our doors and our cars, not to keep our neighbors out. We don’t fear every person walking down our street. We lockup because we do not have a divine power to know who will be the one in 1,000 who will take our things and harm our children. Borders are the locks on our country’s doors. Unless we can know for certain who we allow to cross our threshold we are wise to keep the deadbolt in place.

Sorry to break it to you: There is no Santa. Santa is the grown-ups who make it all happen. We can’t wish for Santa to make the dream of safety come true. We need to be the adults and make our own safety.

Thomas Kachadurian is a photographer, designer and author. He lives on Old Mission with his wife and two children. He is a member and past president of the Traverse Area District Library Board of Trustees.