My Holiday Wish List

What I want for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Solstice, Saturnalia (and whatever other winter celebration you wish to observe) is a society that:

1. Acts out of love and intelligence rather than fear.
2. Accepts that the future will be different than today and works together to make that future more comfortable for all beings.
3. Examines history fairly and in context.
4. Is open to possibilities and willing to begin work on building a world that is beyond the present scope of our vision.
5. Celebrates and learns from our diversity of ideas, religions, sexual orientation and ethnicity.
6. Understands that each generation is responsible for making sustainable choices for future generations.
7. Embraces the notion that more is not better, “better” is better.
8. Embraces learning, exploration, and knowledge.
9. Uses technology to shift our unsustainable energy paradigm to one that is sustainable.
10. Values and extols generosity and denounces greed.
11. Assists its poor instead of denying their existence, ignoring, blaming, or bullying them.
12. Cares for its mentally ill instead of letting them hurt themselves and others.
13. Aids its disabled instead of wishing they would “get better” or go away.
14. Values all benevolent contributions to society regardless of the size of their impact.
15. Rewards whistle blowers rather than punishing them.
16. Removes money from politics.
17. Limits or outlaws lobbying.
18. Advocates for its working poor instead of pandering to the corporations and corporate executives who steal workers’ pay.
19. Makes our children’s education a priority rather than a burden.
20. Ensures that access to health care is not a privilege.
21. Takes steps to ensure that our food is safe.
22. Encourages sustainable and equitable farming and food production.
23. Supplies poor neighborhoods and rural areas with better food options.
24. Realizes that a capitalistic profit-making model is not the best answer for all of our nation’s problems.
25. Makes changes to ensure that our free markets are diverse enough to really foster competitive vigor and stops encouraging monopolies and oligarchies.
26. Ensures that our free press is diverse and has integrity.
27. Puts tight restrictions on truth in messages for election campaigns.
28. Converts a large piece of the defense budget to a peace, rebuilding, foreign aid and environmental budget.
29. Dreams together of possibilities.

I’m writing this first post on the afternoon of the Sandy Hook shootings. The temperature, real and perceived has dropped precipitously today. I began my day reading a Mother Jones article about poverty in America. It prodded me into sharing the article on Facebook along with my rant about—well—about poverty in America. I started thinking for the quadrillionth time that maybe I should go ahead and use the WordPress blog I set up four years ago. I felt a little better after the rant. Maybe I should formalize the rant and exercise my right to rant more often and in a place that feels less like the McDonald’s of the Internet. “But what’s the point?” I wondered for the quadrillionth time. Nobody will read it. It will change nothing. It will be pointless. The world needs another blogger like it needs another sad little egotistical attention whore. Exactly like it needs that.

Then the shootings happened. I cried. I felt angry. I responded to friends’ posts on Facebook. I decided to start writing the blog. It doesn’t matter if my words fall dead into the blogosphere the moment they hit it. My cries for change, my hopeful pleas, my pitiful little ideas about how the world is compared to the way I wish it could be can exist just for me. I can simply enjoy having an outlet for ideas and themes that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I am giving myself permission to dream out loud. I welcome you to join me but if you don’t care to, I will dream alone.

Margot