All I Want for Christmas …

             All I Want for Christmas …

              Published in Marietta Daily Journal Nov. 27, 2016

            Sometimes it’s hard and not even right to be conciliatory.  When American colleges remove the American flag from their campuses, asserting that the flag is “a symbol of ostracism,” it isn’t the time to be conciliatory.

            Similarly, moral relativism is a viewpoint that should be opposed and defeated.  Sometimes there is a hill on which to die, a battle to be fought and won.  At times there should be no calls for unity, only victory.

            Today there are many differences among Americans, however, that aren’t this stark.  When they aren’t, we should and must give serious thought to unity.

            For the sake of unity, one thing I want for Christmas is for every city, town, and hamlet in the nation to hold a dance up and down Main Street early in the New Year.  No showing off, just fellow citizens engaging in two or three hours of pure joy, the joy of community and national unity.

Billed as a unity or friendship dance, it should be akin to a polka, a square dance, line dancing, or any kind that’s not sensual.  As if I know what those three types of dance really are.  In the home I grew up in, all kinds of dancing except square dancing were frowned upon.  We joked that the reason we Baptists opposed drinking and gambling was that they might lead to dancing. 

I say the dance should be on the same day throughout the nation and should be sponsored by the nation’s mayors.  The dancing itself should be led by people who love people, love dancing, and love crowds.

We should be encouraged to bring with us a friend of a political persuasion different from our own, but especially a friend or neighbor of a different race.

Now you see where I’m headed.  From Little House on the Prairie days, on into the 1950’s, Americans were united by a common struggle, eking out a living.  There was far more racial unity than most people today could imagine, in spite of segregation.  Stubborn soil, a depression, and two world wars had an equalizing effect.  We were poor together.

But urbanization and technology are doing us in.  Our houses have become our enclaves.  After a day’s work, we close our doors and watch television, thus entering into the darkest of wastelands.  There we get a warped picture of the world we live in, from television drama as well as from so called news.  There we see racial tension everywhere even though we have worked happily all day with colleagues and friends of a different race.   Twenty-four-hours-a-day news, of course, isn’t news.  It is stress-inducing re-hash that desensitizes all of us. That’s why we must have a nation-wide dance.

  I won’t be dancing, because I can’t.  But I can clap and holler as I watch fellow citizens set aside their differences for a few hours.  I’ll also do any of the dirty work a mayor or any other organizer asks me to do.

So let’s dance.

Another thing I want for Christmas is for churches in every community in America to plan at least three inter-racial worship services, one per quarter, in 2017.  Imagine what it would be like – the exhilaration, the emotion, the fun – for whites, blacks, and browns, to worship God in spirit and in truth, knowing that that old albatross called race is being transcended. 

Interracial friendships would be built and business relationships forged.  If the family that prays together stays together, why wouldn’t it be true of a community?  Every weekend, 40% of Americans go to churches and synagogues, enough to bring peace to chaos if that 40% has unity on their minds.  America needs more integration.  

So let’s worship – together.

I’m willing to take the following action.  I will email my new friend and philosophical polar opposite, author and columnist Kevin Foley, and schedule another coffee time.  I’ll even cave on the demand I gave him when we last talked.  I demanded that since our first meeting was at Starbucks, our next one would have to be at Chick-fil-A.

Believe me, dear reader.  If Mr. Foley and I can be civil with each other, world peace is a distinct possibility.

Public schools are no longer the leveler of our differences or the glue of our culture.  So what is the glue?  It should be freedom and our Constitution that fosters freedom.

Not any more. Because unity takes more than a document.  Neighborly love doesn’t come from a vacuum, but from a context.  That context must be built.  That’s why we had better find some ways to unify.  A nation can’t last too long when its people cannot talk, laugh, dance, and worship – together.

Roger Hines

11/23/16.