Both my parents always remarked – and my mom still does – that “We never appreciate what we have…” and “Nothing is never enough for us…”
Much wiser today, like my mum and dad, I also believe we don’t even know what we have, far less to appreciate the life we live in comparative Paradise in this part of Our World where our worries are always endless, if through our most grievous faults.
But then, the things that bother us really do: like me getting a notice – a week before Christmas – that the water company is about to undertake a major operation that would leave me waterless for at least two days.
Or, my 16-year-old grand-daughter’s generation staring the roof down whenever the inclement weather temporarily causes their wi-fi to flow slow.
Or everybody simply hoping holiday prices this year-end will be affordable-enough to ensure others host enough parties between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Here, it’s ‘Damned if you do’ and ‘Damned if you don’t’ as far as Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre is seen by his partisan political opponents, who’ll never, ever acknowledge the facts and figures that’ll prove he’s already done better and delivered more promises at the end of his first mid-term (on January 21, 2024) than the previous administration.
Across the Caribbean and around the world, we’re already celebrating Christmas 2023 with the vengeance of all the brightest lights we can light since COVID.
And never mind the wars in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza, or the pressures affecting millions in each case, billions more elsewhere (Christians and non-Christians alike) are also busily and anxiously readying for the holidays.
We here are still dreaming of the Christmas Days we grew-up wishing for, with jingle bells in false snow, pine and plastic trees flaked with red stockings, snowballs and colored lights, empty gift-wrapped boxes, readying for a Santa who never comes.
But most of us will spare nary a thought that Christmas has been ‘postponed’ in Bethlehem this year – until whenever…
My ‘water problem’ lasted longer than the company promised and I cringed each time I turned-on a tap, with no flow.
My generation (over-60s) grew-up treating annual hurricanes as seasonal expectations that afforded us sure holidays from school, during which we’d eat hot bakes with cocoa tea and bathe under the guttering – and later pick-up all the fruit downed for us by the wind.
Of course, climates never changed back then, but we’re also just coming out of a Climate Change Summit in Dubai that yielded practically nothing for small-island nations like Saint Lucia and the billions of people in over 100 developing nations directly affected by advanced climate change, but without any help for Loss and Damage, Adaptation or Resilience.
This end-of-year holiday season comes with the usual high and low expectations.
The North-South divide is starting to reverse in irreversible proportions and South-South cooperation is assuming new shapes that portend well for the world beyond tomorrow.
But still, nearly one billion people going to bed hungry or under-fed every night elsewhere, while less than one percent of the over-eight billion people on Planet Earth have enough money and resources to right all the terrible wrongs affecting the world.
Israel has so-far spent at least US $250 Million per day (by its own account) in the 75 days of carpet-bombing Gaza and collectively punishing Palestinians – and we can shudder to just wonder how much that US $18,750,000,000 could have helped start building a Free Palestine.
Common sense is more commonly expressed today than yesteryear, if only in the demonstrated ability of Caribbean minds to open the way to an eternally-evasive commonality of unlike minds between Guyana and Venezuela, while also working to have Haitians decide their future without external interference.
Yet, all that said, I still feel our inability to appreciate too many of the simple things we take for granted is also why we’re still unable to tell how-much is enough.
And hence our demonstrable ability to not appreciate how much better-off we are than so-many others, despite our penchant to still think that greener pastures only exist in lands with long white stretches of lilies and daffodils.
On December 12, I paused my daily noting of the facts and figures from Israel’s War on Gaza in favour of research and documentation of the history of the 124-year-old Guyana-Venezuela controversy that would be addressed two days later by the two nations’ leaders in neighboring St. Vincent & The Grenadines.
It was a welcome break from my almost 24/7 routine of recording death and destruction by accelerating numbers, ‘Live and Direct’ on my home TV.
But ten days later (December 22), my resumed daily count of ‘Gaza by Numbers’ was worse than ever.
After 75 days of relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza, (at least):
• 20,000 Palestinians dead
• 1,140 Israelis dead in Southern Israel
• 137 Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza
• 2,000 Israeli soldiers disabled
• 53,000 Palestinians injured
• 8,000 Palestinian children killed
• 6,200 Palestinian women killed
• 9,000 Palestinians missing (most feared dead and buried under rubble)
• 303 Palestinians killed in the West Bank, mainly by illegal Israeli settlers
• 4,603 Palestinians detained in the West Bank
• 132 UN staff killed
• 286 health workers killed
• 97 journalists and media workers killed
• 1.9 million Gaza citizens forcibly displaced
• 500,000 Gaza civilians with no roofs over their heads
• 128 Israeli captives still held in Gaza
This is what December 2023’s winter is for Palestinians in Gaza – and in Bethlehem, where Christ was born – as we go all-out to celebrate another Merry Caribbean Christmas.
We’ll attend Midnight Mass and all the after parties from tomorrow to next year and we’ll do our very best to share the seasonal cheer here, there and everywhere.
However, it behooves us all to spare a thought for the thousands of families – men and women, children, babies and elderlies – for whom there’ll simply be no Christmas at all.