This is, the song tells us, “the most wonderful time of the year.” Chestnuts roasting... Sleighbells jingling... Peace on Earth...
It’s a shame, then, that in fulfilling pledges to be home for the holidays and spread Goodwill to men, so many of us end up behaving so badly. From competitive shopping to fighting for space in overhead compartments, this is a season that’s not for the faint of heart.
Holiday air travel often reminds me of Thomas Hobbes’s description of the state of nature: “nasty, brutish, and short” - well, unfortunately often not as short as it should be. It makes me think that if the Three Kings had had to fly coach to Bethlehem, they might well have scrubbed the mission.
Sadly, the tensions of holiday shopping and travel highlight a growing incivility in American society. We increasingly seem to be governed by self-interest, instant gratification, and cavalier disregard for likely consequences. We’re increasingly divided by race and class, by income, by political beliefs; we seek to live only with people who agree with us; we embrace our cell phones, not our neighbors – never mind the next person in line.
And it’s easy to ignore people; easy to seek the like-minded on-line rather than engage the messiness of life on the street; easy to dodge difference in favor of the comfortably familiar. Reaching out is hard, civility takes practice, community takes work – effort we all too often prefer to avoid.
But if we lose the habit of citizenship, and avoid the simple day-to-day stuff of community, there’s little hope left for dealing effectively with big issues.
Some people suggest that America is so dysfunctional that only some enormous collective shock, akin to the Civil War or the Great Depression, could jolt us back to being the democratic society we claim to be. Certainly, in our history, we’ve gone through periods very much like this one. The 1850’s and the 1920’s come vividly to mind, both of which gave way to more democratic times – though not without enormous struggle.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. But as we dodge fellow shoppers and travelers this holiday season, we’ll need to take care not to transmogrify our beloved national motto into “Out of many, none.”
