The UK’s Daily Telegraph offered its selection of the best Christmas images from around the world. There was Cookie, a cockapoo running around Peterborough dressed as doggie Santa, and from New York City, the Radio City Rockettes dressed as toy soldiers in their Christmas spectacle. Santa was everywhere, surfing in Sydney, on the International Space station and dancing in Nairobi.
It’s a holiday and a lot of people are having fun today. Fun and laughter are a good thing – they reduce stress and increase seratonin levels; that’s really good for our health. I hate to be a killjoy, but there is a startling absurdity in all this. Just a couple of years ago in 2022, we were reeling in the aftermath of a pandemic. COVID dramatically exposed the fragility of civilization. Remember when our panic at the power of a coronavirus one billionth of a metre in size induced fear at the prospect of touching someone? When 100 human corpses were found rotting in U-Haul trucks in New York?
In those times of uncertainty when we never knew what crisis tomorrow would bring, we resolved to change. Yet the year of uncertainty was followed by a year of inaction, greater income disparity, gender inequality, violence, delusion. 700 million people – 8.5% of the world’s population – are reported by the World Bank, as existing on less than $2.15 a day.
In 2015, UN member states agreed on a shared vision for sustainable growth, aimed at improving education and health, reducing inequality and boosting sustainable growth while strengthening climate resilience and preserving biodiversity. Only 17% of the 17 goals are on track, with a third worsening, and nearly half showing moderate progress. Alongside that, the UBS Global Wealth Report shows that the world is getting richer but the World Inequality Report shows that the richest 1% pocketed over 20% of global income. In the US the richest 1% are reported to hold 40.5% of national wealth.
Writing in the Financial Times in April, 2020 Arundhati Roy offered compelling advice. She wrote, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
A brilliant metaphor for the change that everyone knew we needed. Yet here we are lurching towards what Secretary General Antonio Guterres, too accurately describes, “Humanity has opened the gates to hell…. Horrendous heat is having horrendous effects. Distraught farmers watching crops carried away by floods. Sweltering temperatures spawning disease. Climate action is dwarfed by the scale of the challenge.”
That was in September last year. To that opening statement he added that if nothing changes we are headed towards a dangerous and unstable world. Again. This time without a vaccine.
Just over a year later, there he was again at COP29 in Baku, pleading for humanity to save itself. The Conference ended with wealthy nations committing $300 billion of the $1.3 trillion that is estimated to be needed. Since 2006 when Geoffrey Stern convincingly explained that concerted action was needed to stabilise the climate, and warned of the costs of delay, promises from wealthy nations have failed to materialize. Climate finance – without which indebted, poorer nations cannot build resilience to a changing climate, nor realign for greener growth – is inaccessible to the nations that need it.
The Global Conflict Tracker reports 27 ongoing conflicts worldwide. Apart from the deaths of an estimate 230,000 people from those conflicts this year alone, the impact on the global economy has been cataclysmic. Conflict, global warming, economic crises are increasing hunger and fueling food insecurity. The system we believed in and many saw as needing transformation, is so out of control that some – very few people – are even profiting from that uncertainty. The container shipping industry – a critical lifeline for export reliant nations – is reported to be ‘on track for its most profitable year since the COVID era.’ PHAATA attributes those soaring profits significantly to the Red Sea crisis.
In 2022 an analyst described the record profits container carriers reported, saying, ‘Liner carriers have never made so much money.’ 12 of the largest shipping lines reported earnings of $95 billion for the fiscal year. Profits this year are said to have surpassed that. On the other side of the supply chain, several governments are taking supermarkets and food giants to task for ‘greedflation.’ Profiting from crisis.
That’s a pretty horrible indictment on humanity. And on Christmas Day too. It gets worse, but I am coming to my point.
The Lancet reports that the prevalence of depression has increased 25%. That’s around 5% of all adults globally, who may need clinical intervention. 13% of children aged 12-17 in the US are reported to have had at least one major depressive episode in the past year. People and planet are clearly having a rough time. Apart from pretending its not happening, neither governments nor the people we call our leaders, have shown any ability at leadership or resolving the multiple crises we are in.
Christmas Day is probably a good time to start working out what we might do differently next year. Fresh in the minds of many of us are the words of pastors, who likely explained that Christmas Day is not about Santa, and pointed us to a verse in the Bible that states, “For there is born to you this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.”. Some probably went on to explain that the Saviour they refer to, Jesus Christ, came to exhort us to love God and love each other. They probably added that He died to seal that promise into certainty.
In 2014 a scientific study warned us that social media was fueling a herd mentality, compromising individual capacity for analytical reasoning. It was hotly debated at the time, and while the evidence is likely to have become stronger, you would probably never see it because of the social media and their algorithms that now control the herd. Unfathomable Satanic Christmas events are encouraged while extending a Christmas greetings is fraught with complications in some societies, and speaking itself has become challenging; a UK university prohibited reference to ‘forefathers’ and a local authority also in the UK insists ‘cats eyes’ are referred to as ‘road studs’ due to the perception of gender exclusivity and implied violence against cats. And the planet is in crisis.
Our world is broken. Unborn generations are increasingly likely to face unimaginable pain and hardship. The Miracle of Christmas is the most compelling opportunity we have for the Peace, Love and Joy we need to fix it. It’s not about religion, it’s about hope and harmony.
Merry Christmas.
