By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
“We are the mirror as well as the face in it.”
— Rumi, 13th century
It’s Winter Solstice, the season on this side of the world finally matching our tempestuous weather. Our internal biological clock is urging us to slow down, to gestate, to sleep. But it’s also the holiday season, so there’s a flurry of social occasions to fit into our busy schedules, not to mention planning, shopping, wrapping, cooking, all the trappings of Christmas tradition to attend. Year end will quickly follow, with its laundry list of last minute chores for 2013, and then comes the inevitable let-down that follows our holiday fa-la-la’s.
If we follow pattern, we’ll be exhausted and disheartened by January 1 of the new year. Creatures of habit, we do the same thing each year and wonder why nothing changes.
Because the holidays always bring our emotions into play, this is a big month for culture war. As usual, rhetoric about the faux war on Christmas has continued to amp with Fox News backing Megyn Kelly’s white Santa proclamation as necessary “for the children watching,” although one has to wonder how many little kids find political roundtables must-see evening entertainment.
Huffington polled its readers to see if they cared what color Santa is, and it appears the majority of citizens believe the mythical entity responsible for Christmas cheer is welcome in any color, although half of the Republicans surveyed still insist that he’s white. Straight too, for a jolly old elf, but nobody asked; they’re too busy picking sides on the Duck Dynasty debacle.
In case you missed that flap, proud redneck and born again reality TV patriarch, Phil Robertson, made some comments about gay folk and black folk in a Gentleman’s Quarterly interview that caused the dust to fly. Duck Dynasty is a 21st century version of The Beverly Hillbillies, reality-style, and stalwart fans are aware that Phil’s oldest son is a fundamentalist pastor and that Phil had an early drinking problem which was tamed when he became a fundamentalist Christian. Seems to me that anybody watching the episodes, which routinely end with a prayer in Jesus’s name, can’t be surprised by his traditional views. Appears as though, riding the wave of break-out consciousness change regarding LGBT folks, this particle of grit from ancient days and anachronistic religious thought is sticking in our collective craw.