"The Holidays"

As The United States approaches "the holiday season", I feel my psyche begin to harden (as it does every year) in large part due to my anticipation of the abundant arrogance and emptiness that our culture will express through rampant consumerism over the next several weeks. Put another way, I am a Christian, and I hate the "celebration" of Christmas precisely because the two have so little to do with each other. For the sake of all that IS good in the world, Christmas as we know it should be driven out of existence.

These shouldn't be radical ideas: This Thanksgiving, try telling people how thankful you are for them. It's not easy, but loved ones are too precious and too easily lost. For Christmas, direct your gifts toward people who NEED, not those who WANT. Give creatively and generously (and anonymously, if you can) to the poor, and share a drink with the rest. For Christians, "The Spirit of Christmas" is summed up in John 3:16, not in dollars. You can convey that love without stressing out, without spending a dime, without fighting the crowds, and without becoming part of The Problem.

To be clear, I am a market capitalist, but no like-minded economic theorist sees unchecked capitalism (or utilitarianism, for that matter) as a pure good. Mill and Bentham both, for example, assumed one such limitation when they presupposed the individual possessing a principled set of moral values and skills that fundamentally governed his behavior. Even in the face of aggressive pressure, these foundational notions would bring about balanced, rational decisions in the marketplace. Without this cohesive set of external and primary beliefs, we get what most people call "consumerism", which is a self-referential set of principles derived from the material goods themselves. This is what makes me hurt.