Charting a peaceful course for all seasons

As the holiday season swings fully into view from its early July origins, Nebraska, indeed the nation, is once again awash in the verbal holiday trimmings of December. One of those adorns the editorial cartoon accompanying this commentary.

The drawing was actually designed to run on New Year’s Day, but we trumpet the cartoon’s sentiment or something akin to it throughout December, host to everything from Hanukkah to Christmas to Kwanzaa to Boxing Day.

Peace, goodwill, glad tidings, comfort and joy, and the rest seem strange this particular December what with war and its lethal and bloody consequences raging on two fronts while smaller struggles and bloodshed occupy the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions across the globe.

“Peace on Earth” was the work of my friend and fellow journalist Bill Dunn, out of whose pen flowed wisdom designed to provoke thought, poke fun and occasionally stop us in our tracks. Bill and I were childhood pals, and although the arc of our lives were separate for years, we remained friends and finally practiced journalism together for a few years at the Grand Island Independent until his sudden death in 2014.

History is sated with war, even in December. It teaches us that countries and lesser confederacies have always found ways to bully, oppress and eventually invade in pursuit of power and control, forcing those who only want to be left alone, free to live peacefully among themselves and in coexistence with others, to take up arms. 

Part of the difficulty in watching the nightly news from the front is the powerlessness one feels as an individual to blunt the brutal force of warfare in all its inhumane dimensions.

Still, we cheer as we watch hostages reunited with loved ones, the handiwork of peacemakers, blessed as they are for toiling in and around the hottest fires and coldest hearts.

As it is with peace, war can be an inside job, too, an anger and darkness we visit on our neighbors and strangers, even on ourselves … even in the season of light.

Research during the last decade indicates we’ve never been this mad ever before. An NPR-IBM Watson Health poll before the pandemic revealed 84% of Americans believe we are angrier than previous generations. Nearly half of all respondents reported being angrier than they had been the previous year. According to data from the American Psychological Association, we’re picking up the pace of our anger, too, as we deal with the “collective trauma” from the pandemic and the economic fallout of a changed world. 

Becoming a more bellicose bunch could mean a punch in the nose, too, if, as a seasonal example, you drop a “Happy Holidays” onto the wrong person. That’s because the imaginary “War on Christmas” continues, part of the larger societal conflagration known as the culture wars … optimal word being war.

The juxtaposition of December’s most-wonderful-time-of-the-year well wishes and an angrier people might seem odd, but the uptick in tempers is a year-round occurrence. We’ve witnessed explosions when lines grow long, when the wrong team wins or when a simple difference of opinion becomes a blood feud. Too often we’re well past a stink eye or a “Comfort and joy this, pal.” We’re spoiling for a fight. 

All of us can remember when we seldom saw road rage although we probably didn’t drive any better. We flew friendlier skies, keeping our shoes on and our fists to ourselves. We didn’t cancel, dox or catfish someone because we didn’t know what cancel, dox and catfish meant. We shopped on Black Friday without getting arrested for slugging fellow shoppers over a shiny whatsit or a windup toy. We watched serious political conflict that was virtually free of violence and threats. 

Of course, some argue that the modern edge with which some now conduct human affairs keeps us from being soft or turning into a “snowflake,” not a tribute to the season but an insult to one’s fortitude. Sort of like insisting we have ourselves a merry little Christmas … or else. Or maintaining that Scrooge was right about prisons and workhouses or that Wenceslas would have been fine had he just gone to bed.

Wars bring peril to the planet, diminishing our common humanity. As a single member of the human tribe — unarmed with political leadership or global sway — I remain powerless to change the course of history.

I am, however, able to set my own sails for more peaceful waters. And not simply in December.