A Christmas Punch

Driving to work this morning digging on John Lennon. I grabbed a CD on my way out the door assuming it was the one that has both "Imagine" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" on it.

It was not. It was the "Imagine" album.

My plan was to alternate between those two songs for the entire commute. I have done this before, sitting at this desk, just those two songs at Christmas, over and over again.

It means something to me.

But alas it was not to be.

But as I listened to the CD I realized he was the perfect Christmas guy anyway. He was all about peace and love. A lot of the songs on this album feature John's caustic wit and his straight shot to the gut approach. But there are also plenty of sensitive songs, the ones that make your heart ache at how open and vulnerable he could be about the love of his life and his hopes for humanity.

Peace and love. He hammered those bizarre concepts home for most of his life.

And what the hell is Christmas about, if not peace and love.

His words, his intentions, his message were largely wasted.

We humans are not in a position to let love and peace into our hearts and minds. We are not at a place where we can allow those things to guide us. We are too far gone.

We do not have the integrity.

We are so far removed from what John Lennon envisioned, what he hoped to achieve, that we should not even call ourselves humans anymore. We are some mutated form of monster.

December 14, 2013 marked the 1 year anniversary of the day that 20 children between the ages of five and ten - FIVE AND TEN - were massacred in Newtown, Connecticut. The day that 6 adults were murdered at the school.

The day was commemorated, the children and adults have not been forgotten.

But the world, the entire world, should have stopped 8 days ago. Everything should have stopped for a moment in time, everybody should have stopped moving, stopped doing, stopped talking, stopped breathing.

To relive and to think about the atrocity that was perpetrated.

We should have made that rock bottom in 2012. The stopping point.

No more senseless death. Every resource in the world should have been directed towards steering humanity in a new direction.

Instead all we have done is experience more horrific violence.

Because we cannot accept love and peace as real things. We laugh at them.

We laugh at them cynically because we all know there can never be peace on earth. We all know that those who love are vulnerable.

It says unspeakable things about humanity that we just keep on digesting more horror and more injustice to keep on moving on.

John Lennon. Peace. Love.

I planned to look for Christmas spirit this morning. Hoped to suck it up from deep in my soul to permeate my emotion.

Instead I was assaulted with the twin concepts of peace and love. Those two pesky words.

A short while later I was punching some boxes.

What does it take to make it stick?