The Ghost of Christmas Past & Yet to Come

Long ago, a group of scholars from around the world put their heads together to select the greatest invention ever created.
They selected the barrel, of all things -- which made the great Age of Discovery possible by allowing explorers and colonists to cross vast oceans toting supplies of water, rum, pickled cabbage and salt pork all nice and righty-tighty in wooden containers.
Possibly, these guys were a bit deep into the rum eggnog when they came up with the barrel. Writer Tom Wolfe suggested a better invention at the turn of the millennium, claiming that the internal combustion engine was the greatest thingamagig of all time. It gave us the automobile, the airplane, the tank, the world‘s highway system and commerce, freedom of movement, the sexual revolution, suburbs and the middle class -- in short all of modern civilization.
This may be politically incorrect, but I‘d put a vote in for the wife being the greatest invention of all time, since I‘d be lost without mine, and would even give up the joys of the internal combustion engine, if need be, before I‘d give up my wife. But that would be unfair to half the human race, since so many women seem to complain so frequently about their husbands.
So my vote for the world‘s greatest invention would be Christmas, because it turns the whole planet into one vast colorful machine -- a “big yummy world made for sweethearts“ as Dean Martin sings in “Marshmallow World“ on my favorite Christmas album.
Christmas is the engine that brings prosperity to the whole world. Somewhere in Afghanistan, there‘s a lady whose life was made a little easier 20 years ago by dint of the hand-knit gloves she sold which found their way all the way around the world to me in a Christmas present from my once and forever sister-in-law Lynn. People all over the world benefit from Christmas in the making, buying and giving of presents; and I‘m still wearing those gloves on bike rides, even though the fingertips are long gone.
Even husbands are redeemed in the eyes of their wives at Christmas by dint of the greatest gift they can give woman -- that of children. And one of the finest things you can say about this vast Christmas machine is that it shuts itself off automatically, and is packed away with the wreaths, the bulbs and the fruitcake by New Year‘s Eve, waiting in the darkness to turn itself on again, nine months down the road -- the same period as the gestation of a human child, come to think of it.

We goeth before the fall

Hubris is one of those words that‘s trotted out only on very important occasions. It means overconfidence to the point of being blind, or pride overflowing with arrogance, as in the biblical saying, “Pride goeth before the fall.“
On Christmas Eve, the talking heads on TV were all chirping -- quite cheerfully -- with the prospect that we may have two wars on our hands this year with both Iraq and Korea. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld bragged that fighting two wars would be no problem whatsoever for America, the hubris practically streaming from his ears.
Maybe so, but Rumsfeld might want to consider that Xerxes and Napolean made the same sort of statements before they lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers against the pipsqueak armies of Greece and Russia, respectively. We might also want to consider that the last time we went to war against Korea, more than 33,000 Americans were killed and more than 103,000 were wounded; and that 35,000 of us died in Vietnam, a place we considered little more than a gopher hole at the time.
In all this talk of war on TV, no one seems to consider -- or even care -- that many young Americans could be marching to their deaths in the coming year. It‘s as if we‘ve become disconnected from the reality of war -- like we‘re just going off to play a video game of Grand Theft Auto III or a cops & robbers show where the actors get up and dust themselves off after the shooting‘s done.
But who‘s to say that the road to Baghdad isn‘t mined with vast anthrax bombs, waiting for our troops to go sailing by in battalions? Or that a North Korean nuke won‘t find its way into a container ship in Los Angeles when we start pushing these frightened dictators into checkmate?
We failed to anticipate the 9/11 disaster because of a lack of imagination. That same lack of imagination, combined with our leaders‘ hubris could be our downfall in the coming year. We‘re playing cowboy without considering what‘s called the Law of Unintended Consequences. View On Our Website