A Holiday Thought

Being festive is busy work. For the last four days I've been visiting and exchanging gifts, as well as working every day but Tuesday. I reach the weekend quite exhausted, but I regret nothing. The holidays leave me feeling depressed sometimes, but fortunately this year an old friend of mine came from California to visit his family. He and I go back to middle school together in Troy, New York. What little I've seen of a wider world I owe to him. He invited me along on a summer vacation to Virginia and North Carolina years ago. More recently I crossed the continent to be best man at his wedding. His wife is a schoolteacher and now the mother of three charming little girls. They are as well-matched a couple as I can claim to know personally, and I feel like I have a sort of stake in their family. Their occasional visits leave me feeling more optimistic about people in general, and more concerned about the future.

Left to my own devices I'm susceptible to a certain despairing cynicism about the world. At my worst, I feel a kind of compensatory satisfaction at the prospect of the fall of modern civilization. If the worst happens as soon as some people say, I tell myself, then at least I can die knowing that I won't really miss anything. Once I see my friends' children, I see my error. They will all almost certainly outlive me, and the idea that they might inherit a world worse off than ours horrifies me. Their existence puts projects of mine like this one in a better perspective. They remind me that the purpose of any political activity I might undertake isn't just or even mainly to make a world safe or suitable for myself, but a world safe for those girls to grow in.

Coming back here after a few days, and after yesterday especially, I could readily cast curses on Pakistan or sneer at how the Bhutto assassination is supposed to impact the American presidential primaries, and I probably will come back and do that later. For now, however, it seemed more important for me to write this item. The holiday season is short, after all, and it'll be a new year soon.