Someday at Christmas
Men won't be boys, playing with bombs like kids play with toys. There'll be no wars.
It is the start of 2025 and before we lose ourselves again in the madness that is our current age, these first weeks are a good time to reflect and think about how we want to move forward. As holiday lights and fireworks illuminated the darkness, my attention was inevitably drawn to the monsters that lurk there. What these shining lights revealed to me was that you can only go so much against the very spirit of these holidays before they lose their meaning. In this post, I want to talk about how, in the face of such a stark contrast between these merry days and all the unmerry ones that preceded them, I found meaning within myself.
Do They Know It’s Christmas?
As the holiday season began to approach, people began asking me about my holiday plans, where I was going to eat and when and with whom, and sharing endless lists of stuff they would like. Now I am not the kind of person that wants to engage in all that commercial stuff in the best of years, but I must admit that there is something that does appeal to me about surprising someone with a special cookbook or board game. It’s the thought that counts, as people say. This time, I was just not feeling it. Again.
I’ll be honest, the festive season is a tough one for me this year. 2023 has given us too many blatant lies and too much senseless killing for me to leave my cares outside in the
snowrain. Bloody conflicts like the ones in Ukraine and Gaza have resulted in many people dying or being forever physically and psychologically maimed. As much as I try to put it out of my mind, it is difficult to completely shake the feeling that it is not right to be having a good time with family, or enjoying elaborate Christmas dinners and the accompanying endless supplies of chocolates. Not while people are suffering. ―Robert Urbaschek, Dec 27, 2023.
Sure, part of it was that I did not want to be racking my brain over where I was going to eat and when and with whom while it was still the middle of November. And sure, the fact that I got sick off of one of my friends the week before Christmas and was still recovering also did not do wonders for my holiday spirit. But mainly, it was that after everything that has happened over the last year, from the West and Russia pushing each other ever closer to nuclear war to the unrestrained violence taking place in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond, how could I sit there at those dinners and pretend that everything was just the same as it always was? The cynicism, the insanity, the lies upon lies told to justify it all. I am not going to go into all that right now, because frankly nothing has significantly changed in a year, so I can just link to my post about 2023.
Do You Hear What I Hear?
This was the year that finally something in me broke. The inescapable conclusion finally sank in that there are no lows that Western governments are not willing to go to in order to maintain current global power structures. I think some part of me always had some semblance of hope that when the going got really rough, at least then our leaders would act in our common interest. In 2024, on top of governments continuing to gamble with the prospect of a nuclear holocaust, there was a modern-day version of another one unfolding in clear view. Every day that the carnage in and around Gaza was allowed to continue, every day that political and media figures kept denying what I could see with my own two eyes, every day that yet another report or verdict about indescribable atrocities was dismissed and pooh-poohed, every day that yet another law or rule turned out to not really apply ‘our’ side, I was shown how wrong I was in holding onto that faint hope. I have come to realize that these people could watch their own child push down a toddler into the dirt and then still go on to claim that it was self-defense. Without second thought or a hint of self-reflection, they would play the victim if the toddler managed to kick up some dirt in response. Not to mention call anyone who stands up for the toddler, who was left with little other choice but to react so as not to completely suffocate, an anti-child terrorist and make sure that they are not allowed to tell anybody what happened in those moments before the toddler kicked up the dirt. You get the idea. There comes a point where willful blindness creates situations so bizarre and counterfactual that words no longer suffice, like when you can hear someone on CNN praise democracy and how you can freely ask people in power challenging questions while they play footage of a journalist being removed from the State Department press room for asking questions.
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
Back to the holidays. What was I celebrating? How could I come together with loved ones and appreciate what I had without also thinking about all those who had lost and suffered so much? Especially considering that my country was part of those letting it happen and continue for so long. Moreover, how could I celebrate the start of a new year, knowing that it was unlikely to be much different from the last one? Being confronted with such questions, as well as the inescapable superficiality of my culture, whose hollow values cannot even begin to address my very human needs or help me process my very human emotions in the face of all this, I had to find my own way forward. What I chose to do, was to leave the world outside my immediate environment for what it was for a couple of weeks and to ground myself in the here and now. I did my best to make the people around me feel happy and appreciated, in spite of not really feeling that way myself, and felt touched by the heartfelt well-wishes and gestures I got from some of them. I can tell you that there, in those slower moments where we are making others happy and listening to our inner selves, is where happiness lies. I know that it can be hard to find through all the litter, wreckage, and cultural junk, but it’s always right there in those little moments that you miss if you don’t stand still every once in a while.
Weaving down the American highway
Through the litter and the wreckage and the cultural junk
Bloated with entitlement, loaded on propaganda
Now we're driving dazed and drunk
Been down the road to Damascus, the road to Mandalay
Met the ghost of Caesar on the Appian way
He said, "It's hard to stop this bingeing once you get a taste
But the road to empire is a bloody stupid waste”
Long Road out of Eden, the Eagles Silent Night
For New Years, instead of experiencing the annual Dutch tradition of blowing the shit out of everything, I went to a quiet wood cabin in the forest. That really solidified that sense of being away from it all. After a while, in that calm, in that absence of the constant stream of information that we’re all exposed to, something shifts. I become more relaxed, even though I’m rarely stressed. My thoughts start flowing more freely and at the same time become more focused. My emotions get a chance to be fully felt and understood. In essence, that which needs to be expressed, those ideas that come from the deepest parts of my being, that part of me which is truly my own, can get expressed. One crucial area in which that can work wonders for a writer is, well, writing, leading to wonderful new projects like my fictional story The Embassy, which I have started publishing this month. Check out my announcement about it if you have not already.
I now feel renewed vigor and courage to face the challenges of the new year. There are some hopeful signs in both Gaza and Ukraine that there might soon come an end, or at least some sort of a pause, to some of the violence, although the underlying madness that caused it remains tragically uncured. Hopefully, people on the ground can salvage some new way forward from the wreckage of their homes. What cannot be salvaged from the wreckage, however, is the credibility of the people that through their conceited scheming and brazen gaslighting have willfully caused or enabled the death and destruction.
Happy Xmas, War Is Over
I do not know how this year will turn out or whether what I do will make any difference at all, but I see that as all the more reason to keep doing whatever I can to make sure we do not lose sight of the things that really matter. The coming year, as the years before it, I want to do what I can to stand up for those values of truth, freedom, justice, and love that so many of us embody every single day, and to help our society overcome its destructive forces of profit and war before it is too late.
I hope to see you there by my side.
Peace ☮
“In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.” ― Frantz Fanon
I am with you on most of this, and I'm often struck by the cognitive dissonance of, say, reading restaurant reviews and news of starvation in the same newspaper. However, just to make it clear, have you been to Gaza, as you say you saw it with your own eyes? Or did you see it on a news channel or on social media like the rest of us? These little things are going to matter more and more as we re-enter an alt-truth era bolstered by AI, when we will have to interrogate every single fact.