Month: December 2022

Dreams and imagination

I feel like I’ve been dreaming a lot recently. Mind you, I’m not sure. Many years ago I would get up in the middle of the night if I had a really interesting dream, and I would write it down. Then one day I re-read one of my descriptions of one of these dreams. The plot of the dream was not all that interesting, and my description of the plot was not well written. Then once I had been reminded of that dream, I couldn’t get it out of my head (in fact, as I write this, some forty years later, memories of that dream come back to haunt me). I decided I no longer wanted to clutter up my memory with sad boring dreams. Ever since then, I have deliberately not remembered my dreams.

But it may not be dreams at all. It may simply be that I’ve had a great many ideas bubble up in the past few months. I feel like I’ve finally shed most of the stress induced by lockdown and the pandemic. I feel like my mind and my imagination are finally returning to normal, after two and a half years of high stress forced me to think and feel and imagine differently. And half a dozen years of busy-ness before that kept my mind running in predictable grooves.

How fragile imagination and thought are. Imagination and thought happen best when you have time and space and a lack of stress. How rare it is for us to lead lives that are not cramped for time and space, that are not filled with stress.

Rethinking Christmas as the darkest time of the year

Sometimes I wish we could get over the big emphasis on Christmas as being the darkest time of the year.

First of all, the latitude of the land of Judea where Jesus was born is about 32 degrees north. (That’s about the same latitude as San Diego, California.) At 32 degrees, the length of night at the winter solstice is about 14 hours, just 2 hours longer than at the equinox — enough to notice, but not enough to permeate a holiday.

If you’re into the historical Jesus, as opposed to the Jesus of the Christian scriptures, then you know that Jesus probably wasn’t born near the winter solstice. It appears that the feast commemorating his birth was moved to the winter solstice sometime in the early years of Christianity.

If you’re not into the historical Jesus, then you should be thinking about Christmas as a universal holiday. So consider this: when Christmas is celebrated in the equatorial regions, Christmas night is exactly the same length as any other night. And the further south you go, the shorter Christmas night gets. Christians in Patagonia or Tasmania do not experience Christmas as “the darkest night.”

We could also talk about the weird racial overtones of calling something “the darkest night.” If you think in racial terms, all those Christmas carols and Advent carols and Christmas sermons talking about how the darkness of a winter night needs to be replaced by the great light of Christianity start sounding a little creepy. Like maybe there’s some colonialist thinking, or som anti-Black prejudice creeping in there.

Besides, the Christmas story as it appears in the Christian scriptures doesn’t make a big deal about darkness versus light. Yes, John 1:5 says “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” But John actually says nothing about the birth of Jesus. That’s right, nothing at all. Nor does Mark say anything about the birth of Jesus. Matthew sort of passes over the actual birth, and jumps into the magi.

Only Luke tells about the actual birth, and all that Luke says is this: “While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”

So Luke doesn’t actually say that Jesus was born at night. We just assume he was born at night, because next Luke tells us about the shepherds keeping their flocks at night. But notice — Luke does not say the angel announced the birth of Jesus to the shepherds precisely at the moment when Jesus was born. Or if the angel did, the birth still could have taken place just after sunset. Nowadays, we assume that Jesus was born right at midnight, but I suspect we only do that because it’s when we have all those midnight worship services.

Even if we assume that Jesus was born right after midnight — the time when people have all those midnight services — does that make darkness bad? No, of course not. It could be just the opposite: darkness is good because that’s when Jesus was born. So there’s no need to talk about the light of Jesus’s birth displacing the darkness of evil.

Maybe it would be for the best if we’d just admit that when we talk about darkness and longest nights at Christmas time, we’re really talking about the winter solstice. We’re really combining the winter solstice celebration with Christmas. I like the idea of mixing a pagan holiday with a Christian holiday — but as long as we’re going to do that, we might want to learn some pagan theology. Starhawk would be a good place to start:

“In the ancient Goddess traditions, darkness was not something fearful. White, the color of bone, of snow, was the color of death. Black, the color of fertile soil, was connected to the darkness of the womb, to gestation, fertility, possibility and Mystery.”

Darkness is good. Darkness is about fertility and possibility. Darkness is about embracing the Mystery.

So if Christmas is about darkness, then when we light candles at Christmas, we’re not trying to dispel the darkness. Candles don’t dispel darkness so much as they let us enjoy the darkness. By lighting candles, we’re embracing the darkness, embracing the mystery of new birth.

OTC medicine shortage

It turns out there’s currently a shortage of children’s over-the-counter (OTC) medications in the U.S., including common medications like children’s Motrin, Tylenol, etc.

Why? Because of the large number of children coming down with flu, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and COVID.

Yet another reason to wear a mask in public places. Yes, probably kids are picking up most of these illnesses at school. But I’d just as soon not pass on whatever infections I may have to vulnerable children.

Masks redux

There’s a growing movement to get people to wear masks at public events. The motivation? Maskless events post a risk to people with certain disabilities, and/or with chronic illnesses, and to their caregivers.

In other words, this is an issue of disabilities rights.

Of course, it’s not just masks. Ideally, all the events that we organize or participate in would be set up to minimize the transmission of infectious diseases. And it’s not just COVID. It’s also about influenza and RSV (and yikes, now there’s even a measles outbreak in Ohio).

Which brings us to “The Public Health Pledge: committing to safer and more inclusive events,” which reads like this:

“I am committed to diversity and inclusion, including people with disabilities, chronic illness, and caregivers, therefore I pledge to only participate in or organize events that have robust Health and Safety policies.

“Events must meet these criteria:
• The event has a Health and Safety policy, and if the policy changes it is only strengthened – never weakened – between the event’s announcement and the event itself.
• The event actively communicates this policy by including it on their website, in the registration flow, and speaker proposal process, discussing the policy regularly during events, and including it everywhere important announcements are shared.
• The event’s policy includes active measures designed to minimize the number of participants who are infected with transmissible diseases like COVID-19, as well as mitigate transmission between participants.”

You can “sign” the pledge online.

A good concrete way to strengthen disability rights.

Land acknowledgements

I’ve been trying to find out if the Quonahassit people, when they were pushed out of Cohasset, Mass., joined up with the Wampanoags or the Massachusett, or some went to each. I started out assuming that since they were Massachusett, they would have joined up with that nation. But I can’t find a definitive answer. Another possibility is that a Christian Quonahassit could have joined the Brothertown Indian Nation, which kept relocating westward until they wound up in Wisconsin. (And it’s possible there were at least a couple of Christian Quonahassits, since two Native people joined the Cohasset church in the 1730s.)

In any case, sometime during the course of this research, I ran across a statement by some Native person who said that a land acknowledgement is meaningless unless you have a relationships with the people whose land you’re acknowledging. While this is one Native person’s opinion, this makes sense to me: if you don’t have that relationship, a land acknowledgement can come across as empty words.

International Day of Persons with Disabilities

I didn’t know about this before — the United Nations has proclaimed that December 3 is International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPwD). It’s also known as International Day of People with Disabilities (and I’m guessing that the discrepancy may be because the original UN resolution wasn’t in English, so there are translation differences). In the U.S., there’s a White House proclamation, which reads in part:

“On International Day of Persons with Disabilities, we recognize and celebrate the equal rights and dignity of disabled people everywhere and reaffirm our commitment to building a world where people with disabilities are afforded the opportunities, independence, and respect they deserve.”

I found out too late to do much about IDPwD this year. I’ll have to add it into next year’s calendar.

World AIDS Day

Wear your red ribbon, it’s World AIDS Day.

(Actually, I always forget to get a red ribbon for World AIDS Day. But that’s because I’m the kind of person who forgets their spouse’s birthday.)

Founded in 1998, World AIDS Day was a response to the big pandemic before the COVID-19 pandemic. World AIDS Day is “the first ever global health day.” Even if you don’t know anyone affected by AIDS, any day that highlights public health is A Good Thing. So yeah, wear your red ribbon.

On this World AIDS Day, I’m thinking about Isaac Asimov, who died of AIDS back in 1992, twenty years ago this year. At that time, Asimov’s family had to remain silent about the cause of his death because of the stigma associated with AIDS. Too many people still think of AIDS as the “gay disease,” or the “addict’s disease,” or the “unprotected sex disease,” or they somehow associate AIDS with some behavior that is somehow perceived as being immoral.

Isaac Asimov reminds us of all the people who get AIDS through some other more of transmission. Asimov got AIDS through a blood transfusion. There are first responders who have gotten AIDS while dealing with an emergency situation. The virus that causes AIDS pays no attention to human morality; it simply takes advantage of whatever means of transmission it can.

This is also a good reminder that trying to impose human moralities on transmissible diseases does not make sense from a public health standpoint. Forget the morality, and treat the disease. It’s equally silly to impose human politics on transmissible diseases, as we have seen during the COVID pandemic (e.g., a recent study sadly concludes that more Republicans died of COVID than Democrats).

So wear your red ribbon today. We still need to fight this major public health problem.