Even Hope Is Up To Us
The Worst Best Christmas Movie This Year.
I’m deeply shocked by ‘A Boy Called Christmas’. Why? What could have been a magical tearjerker, for the kids it still will be, is a relevant shocker about the entitlement of the powerful. And I hope I can make the ramifications of the slips in this movie clear. Because this is about centuries of normalization of robbery. Our normal is insane if we look at global consequences, and this movie helps to see it better. (SPOILER WARNING about the movie)
Can we go from fake warm feelings, to real warm feelings?
The Most Disastrous Joke for Adult Viewers in Years
This children’s movie’s hero and his father have a meeting with the King at the beginning of the movie. This meeting is a, kind of jokingly, catalyst incident for the whole movie. First the King, presented to us as a kind old man, asks a coughing man if he needs a cup of water. How caring. Then he asks the assembled crowd, looking dreary, but wealthy, “What are we missing?” I bet for the amusement of the parents a few jokes are put in. People shout suggestions, “A healthcare system!” “Living wages!” “A fair system of governance and food to feed the people.” Funny. But the wrong answers, according to the king. The king then continues, “Let me tell you what I think it is. Hope!” And then he sends brave people out to go a find it.
(SPOILER) And at the end of the movie our hero boy Nicholas, returns to the king with this hope. Once a year, under the guidance of a brave little white boy, a sweet village of elves will make many presents (for free) in order to warm many peoples hearts for many many years to come. And the boy, who in time will become Santa, gets all the credit. The king is happy. The people are a few moments happy. Sigh. Yeah, Santa is a hope bringer?
Opium for the People
So, what I understand of this movies abysmal’s message is that our leaders do not really invest in our well being. They rather graciously ask for our assistance to keep things as they are. Ha! That warm feeling of the presents we have to buy, and then pretend they’re magical gifts. Gifts that should give us hope are actually pills that make us feel complacent. They help us pretend all is well, now that we have human warmth for each other, eh, our own family. Foreigners aren’t really welcome and the homeless should not annoy those still with a house.
Santa is commercial gift frantic, because Black Friday isn’t enough. Within our family we share warmth. But the warmth will too often be reviewed based on the grandeur of the gifts being exchanged. Santa helps us exchange our own sleeping pills. Because, as long as we can pretend there’s no worries with Christmas, we don’t have to panic yet. It seems Marx’ famous quote might also have been, “Hope is opium for the people.”
If you’re into film, there’s an overlooked movie I think should return to the screen. “They Shoot Horses Don’t They.” is a very bleak tragedy about the great depression of the thirties. It’s about a crowd of poor commoners who dance for days on end in a big dance marathon for a big price. Last couple standing wins the prize. They win peanuts compared to what the organizers win. But hey, the poor suckers enter with hope and dance themselves to death at the enjoyment of the spectators. The hidden thought of the audience might be, “At least I’m not that desperate yet.” Yeah, Squid Game has predecessors. And isn’t any lottery, small quiz or game show a miniature Squid Game?
Real World Similarities
The Elfen Village almost feels like all global sweatshop workers who work desperately underpaid for one white billionaire who get’s all the credits. Sounds almost like Amazon. “But we care”, say all advertisements.
By now it’s easy to recognize the same fake warmth within the US democratic party. Just imagine Nancy Pelosi being warm: “We offer hope. We worry about racism. We worry about the poor.” (But don’t challenge the system as it is. Don’t challenge our rule, our industrial donors, my Wall Street investments, or you’ll get another Trump.) How awful to consider them the ‘alternative’ to the US republicans. These are the robber barons who only more blatantly rob the US people. Their success rides on their expertise at fear mongering marketing to get many anxious people to vote for them. But are they different?
We saw the same false hope at COP26 in Glasgow. Heroes like Greta Thunberg, Sir Richard Attenborough, and more activists may plea to the gathered politicians and lobbyists. After they’re gone, these people do what they do best: negotiate while protecting interests. And the outcome mainly focusses on CO2. Plastics, pollution, industrial overfishing, political corruption seem all but forgotten. Bezos hardly won’t feel pressure. He can safely continue his overproduction and sales of junk, not even including the 450+ million tonnes of packaging plastics yearly. No, we may look with hope to ‘Ocean CleanUp’ videos, while the production and flushing more plastics into the ocean continues, enriching a tiny few and damaging the rest of the planet.
Brexit has shown the UK now is almost owned by very rich people. And it seems they are less and less pretending they even care. Putin wallows in a golden palace even some billionaires get envy over. Xi Jinping seems to behave as the Catholic Church did for centuries. When a famous Chinese tennis player recently accused one of his close allies for rape, she was the one who got into trouble. And though Epstein got caught, all of his equally rich friends seem to get away with it. Berlusconi in Italy, Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, Marcos in the Philippines, etc, etc. The arrogance will only increase the more accepted the status differences are accepted.
The father of little Nicholas says to his son in ‘A Boy Called Christmas’, “We love the King, who deserves everything he has. So do we and we have nothing.” What!? Yeah, accept wealth differences. If they happen you’re to blame yourself. Meanwhile the oblivious king sleeps in a place waiting for our hero to bring ‘hope’ to his people. This King has birthright. Bezos had many very rich investors, many underpaid workers suffering to bring him his wealth. So selfmade? Deserves everything he has? How is this logical? Before you think I’m a communist, I want to take you into another direction.
Who Owns Everything?
To whom belongs a forest? Who has the right to chop it down? The one who buys it? The one who got the contracts? Or, idiot idea, to all living beings who live there? To whom belongs the ocean? Who has the right to take out all fish, or may pour terrible chemicals and plastics into it? To whom belong indigenous tribal lands? To them, or the ones who kick them out or kill them? History tells us, we may pine for the underdog, but power decides. My point is, that at this point in time we’re all indigenous to this planet. We all share it’s space, water, and air. Then why do some have ‘the rights’ to chop our trees, empty our oceans, kill our tribes, pollute our water and air? Who are they?
This is not because of the tragedy of the commons, this is plain robbery. The big corporations that scavenge the planet, rob natural resources, destroy our shared lands and seas. That is more like invaders stamping across our shared commons and taking it for themselves. Then they produce nice beads and mirrors and exchange it for our hard earned gold. Then they use that gold to bribe politicians to set laws even more in their favor. We know major corporations have lied about side effects, lied about amount of harm they do, have send lobbyists and played the media with marketing. And still we think they worked for their wealth and deserve it. They made is so accepted that many people will claim any criticism against the rich is communism.
Can We End the Entitlement and Robbing?
I’m not in favor of sharing money equally with everyone. I’m not in favor of putting the culprits heads on spikes. History has shown us enough people like Stalin, Franco, Robespierre, Pinochet and other winners of revolutions who were worse, let alone more of the same. Such a feat will change nothing, just help new psychopaths into power. What I am in favor of is that these industries:
- lose their power to lobby.
- lose their ‘personhood’, the fiction that they are a being, which protects crooks within the system. Managers and owners should be personally responsible, much like Nazi guards were also held personally responsible, while quoting “Befehl ist befehl.” (Order is order.) If you either sold doctors knowingly addictive medicine, sluiced toxic waste water into rivers, or manipulated audience to accept plastics in their food through marketing, because of your financial interest, then you are a crook.
- lose their power to manipulate (greenwashing) on packaging (like Tobacco, force them to put on packages ‘Hormone Treated Meat’, ‘Aggressive Plastics Used for Packaging’, ‘Soy from Cleared Amazon Forests’ etc)
- lose all trust in their ‘science’ and pay all governmental inquiries into their product and producing methods.
- lose all funding and tax advantages, which will be transferred to really green start ups and alternatives.
- will have to pay for the damages they do. And we chase them after them, or the tax havens hiding their money. Let’s treat them and their money as we treated Afghanistan and Bin Laden. If you protect their money, you’re part of the problem.
- And or they’ll have to pay huge pollution taxes. “yeah but then they go broke!?” Sure. For years it’s known that if these very ‘profitable’ companies would include all costs, many would be very unprofitable. And for those that cry, but “my hamburger!”, “My Ikea junkwood”. Well it may take more time, but if patient, you might buy stuff of real value.
I’m also in favor of the following next steps:
- All lower employees and managers get offered new jobs at these new really green start ups. But the higher management, the people who consciously hurt people and planet, well they have to face a truth commission like at the end of Apartheid.
- Jobs are no longer seen as the backbone of a healthy society. Considering the amount of bullshit jobs and planet damaging jobs, we should no longer hold them sacred. Create a basic income. It would force companies to make work more attractive, more healthy and organize more around meaning than just profits, just to attract staff.
- Create a Solarpunk culture. Leave mass production behind and go back to craftsmen who will sell you a chair for $1000 that will last a life time. More and more people voice their longing for this.
- Create a regenerative design culture, where our enterprise actually makes nature better too.
- Make cities technological independent of mass distribution. We have the tech to make local food and energy work, even in big cities. Who dares to become the first Transition Cities Capital of the world?
To me the last three suggestions offer what I’d call true hope. And, if you want to connect it to the movie, then we all should be elves, not receiving humans. And we, the elves should not make toys, but help a natural planet to flourish.
But, What Can I do?
So wonder, ask yourself: Am I one of the millions of workers, who sustain the power of the Kings? Do I work to spread false hope that keeps people enslaved to our current reality? Is my work part of destroying our ecosystem? Does my work add to the illusion real attempts at change are being made? If I’m honest, have I lied to myself to comply and play along? If so, then what are you doing?
If you are afraid to face these questions.. If you can’t leave your job, because of financial pressures.. If you can’t ask, help, support real change you want to see, because of obligations, threats or contracts.. Then how free are you? Then aren’t we living in another dictatorship, just one that is much smarter at hiding it?
In short, we need to end the harmful entitlement and end accepting global robbery as business. We have morals about robbery. We made laws with loopholes, and freedom. We must work to turn that around. For this we need to collaborate among ourselves, while sending pressure upwards that they support the change. And they must, for every human within the corporations has a family too. And they too currently suffer cancers due to chemicals in food, get lung disease due to air pollution and or find their land threatened by sea levels rising. They may live in gated communities afraid of us. They should learn to be more afraid of the danger they themselves create on this planet.
How Can We Start?
If you want real hope for Christmas, then don’t hand out any gifts made with plastics or oil. Don’t buy online, certainly not from Amazon. Don’t eat meat from industrial animals, or better no meat at all. If you want real hope, discuss what you and your family can do and how to help make it possible. And don’t sell your solutions to the Kings, who’ll buy and corrupt good ideas for even more profit. Share freely. Start joining awesome movements like Transition Towns and Regenerative Design using Solarpunk to envision where’d you want it to go. It is up to us.
And perhaps for starters, demand that you want to enter stores and walk out with organic food, without plastic wrappings, affordable for everyone. That’s where all the funding should go to. Not to the industries that have known for 40+ years they should have created such a world, but greed made them look away. They have become dinosaurs whose time has come. We should seek to be the meteorite that gives space to warm mammals, who understand and live with love for each other and their environment.
More simply said, choose love. True love is having compassion and care for other living beings. Not because they’re yours, but because they are alive and share this planet. And all living beings long to enjoy living and flourish as a species. We train this at Christmas with each other, but the rest of the year we should practice it with everyone and everything alive.
Understanding that is Christmas.
Because if we don’t listen to calls like these, such calls will come closer and closer to home and get more and more aggressive, over feeling being denied justice.
