A Cheer For Christmas

You know the silly season is upon us when barbs start flying around over “holiday trees” and the supposed ethnicity or gender of Santa Claus, not to mention the unending barrage launched by vested interests to get you to buy stuff. Needless to say, the significance of the birth of Jesus to Christians is deeply overshadowed by this noisome pestilence.

Perhaps there is some use in one aspect of all this: namely of its supposed help in restoring the economy. The irony in such attempts to revive a moribund economy by trying to get poor us to spend more and more of the money we don’t have cannot be lost.  That irony is deepened further when it is realized that the economy is where it is today because it was driven there, in the first place, by the actions of those captains of commerce who did not care much about what they were doing to the public, quite against the Christian message. But instead, they just took and took until it hurt.

Holiday Trees, Black Santas or Santas of unspecified gender are good for a laugh, and talking about them should stimulate seasonal merriment that would otherwise be subverted by suspicion that overusing our credit cards is just creating opportunities for predatory elements in society. 

So, therefore, let us all be merry and, as well, wish for a really new and improved New Year.

Tell Fren Tru

PS. Some of you might be relieved to note that I haven’t even asked for a donation to the cause of the Sierra Leone Sickle Cell Disease Society this year. You may find details of what they do at www.sleonesickle.org

A Legacy For Mandela

A great man has died. He leaves behind a playbook on how to live a life.  But somehow, I feel that few of us would be smart enough to follow what is written therein. Anyway, by and large, it is wholly unimportant whether we do or not. Our personal lives may end in a shambles or we might succeed in wrecking the life chances of those nearest and dearest to us. But in the grand scale of things that matters not a fig.

But when we consider those who have the power of life and death over millions of their fellow citizens, I shudder at the potential they have for continuing to cause distress and suffering far and wide. Mandela’s playbook is one that the majority of African leaders refuse to read (or, more likely, are not literate enough to grasp) so that half a century after independence from European colonialism, African countries continue to languish at the bottom of all tables of human development.

Much eulogizing is coming from all quarters including from Africa itself. I have no desire to be a party-pooper, but many African leaders would be well advised to cut out their sanctimonious nonsense, and instead, commit themselves to delivering the good government that the continent has lacked these long fifty years. That would be a legacy worthy of the man.

Tell Fren Tru