Once again.

I had considered skipping Christmas this year because it presents what has proved to be pretty much false hope. And yet we drag it out every year. And yet, there is certainly much beauty in its music and imagery. And yet, without it, events might have been even worse. Besides, without Christmas and its coincidental Santa Claus, would my parents have ever spent the princely sum of $24, if I remember correctly, to give me a chemistry set?

So, I am up before -6:30, well before sunrise, to listen to BBC World Service broadcast Eric Milner-White's Festival of Lessons and Carols. It is a singularly poignant celebration this year, the centennial of the end of the war to end wars. Milner-White had just been released from the Army. Small wars smoulder around the globe this morning as I sit in my cozy home amidst the firs, the stock market is teetering, the US is 'led' by an idiot who is casting aside all ties to sanity, and Russia, having survived communism, has a new Czar who seems to be seeking an empire.  I am reminded of the first Christmas of the Great War. The troops had been told that they would be home by Christmas. But they were not home, they were freezing in trenches trenches dug into northern France. The troops, not yet adjusted to total war, am insanity such as the world had never before seen, and certainly not expecting to spend nearly four more years in the mud and the blood, stopped shooting each other for a day, and sang carols, played a bit of football, smoke cigarettes together. Their commanders responded with court-marshals and threats of executions. There would be a small attempt at such a truce in 1915, but by 1916 the armies of Christian Europe had pretty much given up on the rule of the Prince of Peace.

Much of the current world turmoil, especially the immigration and Brexit turmoils in Great Britain, can be traced to events and decisions made during that war and the treaty negotiations that followed. None of these of course will be mentioned in Chapel of King's College this Christmas Eve. The words spoken and the songs sung will recognize strife and turmoil of course. But they will also remind us that such things are timeless, as of course are hope, and joy. That joy and hope remain timeless is perhaps the biggest failure of Christianity.

Having sung o come, o come,  Emmanuel for four weeks, making joyful noises about God with us, we will pack Emmanuel away for another year, the baby Jesus joining God in Heaven where he belongs so that we may get on with the affairs of Caesar. We will join with Herod in the continual slaughter of the innocents.

What is remarkable about the story of the birth of Jesus is that it is meek and lowly. Gods are supposed to strike people dead with lightning bolts, to make war with invincible hammers, to fly through the air in war chariots. God the son is the son of man. God the son is born to a poor woman in a country province of the empire. And his kingdom, if there is to be one, depends not on the work of gods but on the work of women and men who do not seek power.

Many times have I recited the boastful words of the creeds, 'he shall come again in great glory, and judge the quick and the dead.'. it being so wonderfully convenient that we have sent him into heaven to sit at the right hand of the father. But the truth is that I don't await his coming in glory, the second coming, because the first has been  such a fizzle. Great music, magnificent buildings, wonderful art, yes. But peace, not so much.

I am, however, a fool. I don't expect the first coming to take effect. But I hold onto a silly hope that it could be a possibility. So once again, I wake early on the morning of 24 December 'to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass . . . .'  Hope springs eternal in the human heart, because the human heart is a very slow learner.

On Swedes: difficulties of immigration

In the divided territory occupied by the United States these days, few issues seem to be so divisive as immigration. The Presidency is occupied by a minor reality tv  personality who has made his political career by stirring up fear, and it seems his greatest success has been increasing the fear of immigrants. Most of my friends tend to be in the  liberal-to-progressive faction, and they lean towards an open border policy. 'We come in peace. All men are brothers.' (Except of course one is not allowed to say 'All men are brothers' because it's sexist and fraternalistic.)

I am uncomfortable in both (all) of the factions. So far as I know I am fully human, with no Klingon ancestry, but I distrust emotions as a basis for political policies. Fear is, in my opinion, probably the most dangerous emotion, especially when it is misdirected by refusing to face our real fears and transferring them to some other object. But cheap 'love' sometimes can be as dangerous, in that it lets us lure those we like to think we love into very dangerous situations in which we can then do nothing, or easily choose to do nothing to help them.

There is no doubt that the United States have benefited from immigration. A quick search of sources will find a long list of liberal and libertarian arguments for the past benefits of immigrants to the United States. Most recent presidents and presidential candidates have made speeches containing the phrase 'we area a nation of immigrants.' That phrase is often followed by some statement like 'immigrants built our railroads, mined our coal, manned our factories, grew our wheat, . . . .' Not dwelling on the distinction between 'immigrants' and 'our' in such statements, I would point out that one of the most important parts of those claims is that they are in the past tense. There are certainly many immigrants making America great in the present time. One of the founders of Google is an immigrant. The CEO's of Microsoft and of Google are immigrants. The founder and CEO of Amazon is an immigrant. The founder of Tesla and Space X and whatever else he's doing this week is an immigrant. Even Steve Jobs biological father was an immigrant. And without H-1B visas, many critical contemporary American industries would be crippled, something which the current US regime seems to be trying to achieve.

But, there are very many folks who are seeking asylum or residency in the United States who do not have the skill set of Sundar Pichai, and who are certainly not entrepreneurs. They are the 'tired, .  . 
. poor, . . . huddled masses yearning to breathe free, . . . [the]  wretched refuse of . . . teeming shore, . . . the homeless, tempest-tossed.'  Unfortunately, these are just the sorts of people for whom jobs and opportunities are missing in contemporary America, where railroads are not being built, where mines are closing, where factories are closing, and where the current regime's trade policies are shutting down markets for wheat, even if there were still jobs in the wheat fields.

I began thinking about writing this essay as I overheard a discussion in a produce department about I had called rootabagas only to be corrected by another man that they were 'swedes'. i thought about Carl Sandburg and the America in which he was raised and in which he wrote, an America that still sent posters to European lands seeking immigrants, and America that would produce Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon. But even in that past Americans were not so welcoming as we like to remember ourselves. Just a few miles south of the quiet forest in which I write, in Edmonds, Washington, where Boeing is dependent on workers all around the world to produce it's 'American' airplanes, a 'fact' that the current occupant of the White House liked to warp when he landed to shock and awe his supporters in his Boeing 757, Chinese workers were forced to 'commit suicide' by jumping off a bridge, sometimes several times when their 'first attempts' failed, because other, European workers were reaching Edmonds from the eastern states.

The United States today face one of the biggest changes in economics--which at one level we see as jobs--that has ever occurred, as we move from a scarcity state to an abundant state. We aren't yet at Star Trek levels of capabilities, but we're getting there fast. But the discussion about it has not reached the politicians who want to make policies for the future, unless seeing something is happening here that they don't understand and so want to forbid can be considered policy. Until we begin to adjust our understanding and options, I fear that open borders will simply make having such a discussion even more difficult.

I hope that the word will reach those on the 'teeming shore' that the United States are little better prepared for the future than anywhere else. Indeed, the United States may be worse prepared than many areas of the world because it has long been in the vanguard of change, and therefore also bears the brunt of that change. But few states are founded on the liberalism of Locke and Smith and Company that has encouraged the United States towards inclusion.  I can't imagine a Salvadoran emigrant expecting to be welcome in Ghana.

(An interesting side note is Japan, which has long opposed immigration, preferring to keep Japan Japanese and preserving as much of its weird culture as is possible in the day of Sony and Toyota, is finding it helpful to invite skilled immigrants to fill the labor gap that has not yet been solved by robots, but Japan is not issuing permanent immigration visas.) 

In the meanwhile, as the number of emigrants/immigrants grow, partly because so many nations are in turmoil and partly because there are just so many of us folk nowadays, the United States probably have more ability to absorb immigrants than the much smaller European states such as Sweden or Germany or England, where there are real immigration crises.  But this is a comparative ability only, simply because of the scale of the United States.  Neither the Republican fear-mongering of immigrants nor the Progressive love fest over immigrants does anything to solve what will may become a very difficult situation without intelligent, serious, data-based investigation of what the future may hold for economic residents of the United States.  A much more comprehensive policy than a wall or a cache of bottled water is needed.