It seems that the communications satellite to be put into polar orbit by India in April was designed by college students and their instructors at Madras University in India. Another newspaper story carried the information that a new method for detecting breast cancer had been developed by students and instructors at the University of Arkansas. The detection method analyzes the chemical composition of tears collected from the eyes to detect telltale indications of the breast cancer. Now that’s money well spent and knowledge and experience almost impossible for young minds to get in any other scenario.

That the instructors and students collaborated to provide something useful to society is proof that this method can be replicated at every classroom in every school in America. And the cost benefit ratio could be beyond the breadth of imagination. Maybe a cure for cancer could someday come from just such an activity. What we can imagine is the only limit to our achievements as a specie.

Concerning the affordability of education, I began to consider that with high cost comes a paring of the intelligence pool from which innovations arise in the world. Intelligence is not a product of wealth, but wealth is a limiter on those able to enhance their education, and by inference, the ability to use the intelligence structure that was given at birth. Speaking to a couple of college students recently and talking about the cost of education, one of the students told me that he had already spent in excess of $100,000 seeking a degree for his future. Not many young people have access to that amount of money to spend on education. And those who can borrow that amount would face a formidable obstacle to solvency when they graduate.

Obama wants to make higher education more affordable by changing the ratio of grants to loans, from 70% loans to 70 % grants. I think this is a good idea, and would be money well spent, but I also would like to see more emphasis on providing “projects” for the students in collaboration with instructors. Obviously this would require better instructors and more cooperation with all segments of society to identify needs and prioritize them. This need would also indicate that teacher pay should be tied to performance. However that idea is a hot potato with teachers unions and tenure at Colleges and Universities. There is a wealth of opportunity for improvement in our educational system. We need to direct money there before we bailout another “To Big to Fail Private Enterprise”. Because if anything on our planet is “To big to fail” it should be the vast untapped potential of our educational system.

Amongst other things, we need to change our thinking and our language. For the US government and the press, every person that takes up arms in any way to protect himself and family, or to drive the occupiers out of his country is a “terrorist” or “insurgent” and probably trained by the often sought, but never found, Al-Qaeda.

If we had enough empathy in this country to realize that most of the violence we see in the Middle East is from people who are, to their own people, patriots! If the tables were turned and we were the occupied country, having our citizens shot and our towns bombed by the invaders, we, too, would be “terrorists” and “insurgents,” planting IEDs, cutting throats, sniping, anything to drive the invaders and their Quisling officials out of our country.

So it has been with any occupation. If we cannot learn to sit down and talk these things out; to at least come to a mutual understanding, we shall just go on, spending huge sums to kill each individual patriot until we run out of money.

Afghanistan has been eating foreign armies since the time of Alexander. They are very good at it. Ask the British. Ask the Russians. Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan are tribal areas, linked by blood and clan. They do not recognize the artificial borders set up primarily by the West. A relation killed on one side of the border will be avenged, if necessary, by a relative on the other side.

Every time we hit a village or a house with a half-million dollar Hellfire missile, hoping to kill a guy or two with a gun, we create yet another blood feud with a people who do not forgive or forget. I would not be a Russian or American tourist in either country, even in the 22nd century, for there will always be somebody who will remember.

We could be an agency for good, providing engineers, doctors and builders, but we will accomplish little at the point of a gun. It may already be too late. I watched an interview with some Afghans the other day. Several said, “We don’t want your bridges and your schools and hospitals, we want you out of our country, and out of our lives!” I think this is, perhaps, the best solution. Just bring the troops home, then concentrate on healing our own, badly damaged, country.

Hmm…if His Holiness is really defending my way of life, he’s slaughtering civilians and wasting billions in taxpayer dollars in the name of atheism, anarchism, veganism, and so on. How odd…

Here’s a news flash for the Pope of Hope: “Our way of life” (in the more general sense) not only needs to be apologized for, it needs to be permanently altered…in a major way. Americans constitute 5% of the world’s population but consume 24% of the world’s energy. On average, one American consumes as much energy as two Japanese, six Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 31 Indians, 128 Bangladeshis, 280 Haitians, and 307 Tanzanians.

Ponder this: a human born in America will have, on average, 370 times more of an environmental impact than a human born in Ethiopia. Let the president of Ethiopia eschew lifestyle apologies (for now). Here in the United States of Consumption, we lack that luxury. As Paul Hawken sez: “Really going green, means having less. It does mean less. Everyone is saying, ‘You don’t have to change your lifestyle.’ Well, yes, actually, you do.”

To borrow from the Situationists, in May of 1968: The future will only contain what we put into it now.

All of the above are labels. They describe race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual preference, or a political viewpoint. These labels bring different images or thoughts to mind to different people, and as I was writing this series something has become woefully obvious to me, besides the fact that writing about Israel or religion is like trying to walk on eggshells without breaking any.  No matter what I write, the reader can never fully comprehend my exact thought pattern. Let me explain.

Take “Israeli” and “Palestinian” and combine them as the AP, CNN, and even Ron Paul, Cynthia McKinney and I have more or less done into the simple phrase: “The Israelis are attacking the Palestinians in Gaza.” However, speaking for myself, this is not what I really want to convey.

I really intend to convey something like: “The Israelis, mostly the government hardliners who are not supported by the secular Jews and other peaceful individuals or religious Jews, nor by the shministim (conscientious objectors), nor by an undetermined number of other assorted individuals like Rebeka, Noah, or Habib, nor even by the 550 IDF “Courage to Refuse” soldiers who have pledged their continued service but refuse to have anything to do with military actions in the occupied territories, nor the current Ministers of Education and Commerce who disagree with the Gaza attacks but keep their mouth shut, nor the Knesset (parliament) members who have spoken out against the war, are attacking the Palestinians in Gaza, whom include many Hamas insurgents, some Hamas terrorists, many other armed  individuals or factions, plenty of innocent families who both support and do not support Hamas, several Israelis and many other foreigners who believe in peace so much they are working with the many NGOs, etc.” (photo)

So you see, using any label for groups has a high chance of failing to convey the speaker’s true thoughts. Plus, my eyes would glaze over while typing such an elaboration, and any readers would  quickly fall asleep.

However, it is a necessary habit for us humans to classify whatever we seek into groups, whether it is to classify Douglas fir trees and Ponderosa pine trees all together as evergreens, or to classify both Jews and Palestinians as Semites. [Yes, Semite is a general term for both groups, so if you on the side of the Palestinians technically you cannot possibly be anti-Semite.] We need labels to make sense of the world we live in.

Now, the socialists or collectivists, have a far stronger sense of this need to classify. Indeed, they have an insatiable innate desire to divide up people and hence master them. Their intellectuals and statist leaders -  Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Bush II and many European rulers come to mind – often have very apt abilities to segregate peoples and cultivate or propagandize “Us Vs. Them” mentalities.  Liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans comes to mind.  So does the ever-present ‘terrorist.’ Unfortunately, their sheep-like followers do nothing more than excitedly parrot these leaders or intellectuals, or chew their cud peacefully content.

However, if one undergoes a paradigm shift and understands that everyone is a unique individual, not merely a boilerplate group of stereotypes; the world does a back-flip and is no longer recognizable. No longer are groups full of mindless robots all chanting the same stereotypes. No longer does racism exist.

Sure, group labels are still used for ease in human communication and debate, as ways for individuals to freely associate and describe the world we see, but when one looks through the lens as an individual, only other individuals stare back.

Hope you enjoyed reading a few of my thoughts in this series as I much as I did while writing them!

There cannot be Christmas without children. On Dec 25, you will truly appreciate this paraphrase: “The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to children.”

On this day, children all over the world turn color blind to appreciate the pastel-perfect joys of Santa Claus and his reindeers, Yule logs burning by the fireplace, sylvan snow-topped cabins with their smoky chimneys, and ornamented Christmas trees with presents piled up. There may be Christmas carol sorties into your home, bringing much mirth and the familiar Ho! Ho! Ho!

Never had such a transplanted festival create a sense of oneness among children. Take away Christmas and you take away a seasonal joy entitled to them. It is so innately appealing to children that they universally provide the finest celebratory squeals in honor of the most famous birth ever recorded — and contested — in history.

Wherever there is a Santa, a Christmas tree or carols sung, few adult killjoys dare reprimand children that none of the scenes and lilts of nativity are well, native.

Christmas traditions had drifted to much of the world on crests of colonial waves. The sinews of raw power may be flexed to determine new rulers, codicils, industries and taxations but in its veins flow a more permanent infusion of culture, languages and traditions. Take away some newer traditions and you will be up against an army of children. Or, adults for that matter.

If you are one to ponder over alien semiotics and cultural subversion as some philosophers do, listen to the lyrics of the Spanish-English carol Donde Esta Santa Claus. When the tempo nears its apogee, hark ye the Ole! Ole! Ole! There is nothing Christian in this. In fact, even today, few Spaniards — frenzied football and matador fans alike — realize that the  trademark Iberian rally cry literally invoke (the intervention of) Allah! Allah! Allah! It is tradition that goes back a millennium to the Moorish Caliphates of Spain.

Traditions are our heritage.

Christmas may come in nuanced forms, but the one which universally prevailed is the Germanic variant. If you have a plastic Christmas tree bedecked with lights and decorations, play a soft O’ Tannenbaum (O’ Fir Tree) to enliven the atmosphere. The song is better known as O’ Christmas Tree in another German tongue — English. Even the Vienna Choir Boys, purveyors of the finest caroling traditions, switch between both languages to stamp the Teutonic nature of a universal Christmas.

And touching on Vienna, the city lies on a cultural fault line that has a bearing on Christmas. It was here that the great Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich made a startling observation: Asia begins at the Landstrasse (a street in Vienna).

He was right.

Move eastwards and Dec 25 is postponed by the stubborn chronometry of the Julian calendar to Jan 6 or 7. This is the day when much of Orthodox Christianity celebrates Christmas, from Belgrade to Athens to Moscow to Istanbul. Only in a non-Christian Jerusalem can there be three Christmases celebrated by legacy custodians — on Dec 25, Jan 6 and Jan 7.

The failure to celebrate Christmas together is no mere calendrical curio; it is a truncated event that that symbolizes a splintered Christendom. Croatians and Serbs may share a common tongue and may have intermarried beyond overt differentiation, but they remain age-old nemeses.

It gets deeper. Despite their common European heritage, Americans and Russians display a mutual suspicion that is so primeval, and so ingrained that it could not have sprung from 80 years of Bolshevism. (They are both market capitalists today).

It is primeval allright, dating back to 1054AD when the Eastern Church balked at the ecclesiastical demands of Roman Catholicism. The split was venomous and even today, long after the subsequent protestant and charismatic revolutions within the Church, ingrained prejudices remain colored by the Roman lens.

This event led to centuries of biased theological scholarship and a subsequent obscuring of Dec 25.

The intellectuals, the rationalists and the logicians would scoff at them all. It is all there recorded in the pages of history: Dec 25 was a Roman tribute to Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (The Birthday of the Unconquered Sun)!

Case closed. Christmas is pagan. Sorry kids!

Actually, not so fast…Ho! Ho! Ho!

Roots of the Historical Christmas

The birth and life of Jesus is now dubbed the “Greatest Story Ever Told.” It sounds like a fantastical bedtime story, ideal for kids but little more.

Adults though have a problem unlike children. In their quest for meaning, they still want to believe in something. This story is an archetype that echoes through their consciousness, in movies, in books, and in deeds. Anyone who has ever stopped to help a stricken neighbor, or who had embraced those deemed unworthy, hopeless or condemned relives that story.

It goes back to Eden.

According to ancient accounts, a Divine plan was activated to salvage man from his own folly, rebellion, and inability to take dominion of the earth in a state of harmony.

Thus, a part of the Divine Himself would be born in human form, to sow the seeds of truth and salvation. This was leadership by living example and ultimately, through sacrificial death. Christians believe Jesus was the One.

To man then, as it is today, life meant warfare. He had to either cut down or undercut his neighbor to maintain an existential equilibrium. Call it the Global Trinity where there must be a victor, a subject, and a collateral damage. It was, and remains, a dog eat dog world, even when the crumbs get fewer.

Old plots are rehashed perennially in new guises.

If the year 2009 promises uncertainty, be advised: The same failed success stories — no oxymoron here — are still around, regrouping in another guise to build another towering eyrie out of the rubble of their latest failed enterprise.

There is nothing new under the sun, as the wise King Solomon would say.

The starkest ancient account of this enterprise was the Tower of Babel project, where, the most intelligent of men saw the need for order, with One Religion, One Language, One Financial Standard, and One Code of Laws to govern, and exert dominion over mankind.

Sounds familiar?

If you like surrendering your life — even your thought life — to an elite few, this idea might appeal to you. Think of it! No more ethno-religious wars, no more terrorism, no more “Us vs Them” as everything is adjudicated by the ones “Above.”

And there will be free-for-all welfare! Those who resist this, or who believe in some Bethlehem fairy tale should be struck by Jardis of Narnia.

Communism failed folks, and some of its high priests have turned into hedge fund managers, sub prime stars, and AAA+ consecrated Ivy Leaguers that an irreligious Dow Jones just fails to apotheosize, just as the plebeians failed to appreciate Marxism earlier. There has to be greater order, greater enforcement, and greater scrutiny. Nothing less than a New World Order.

The Bible says God saw through such thoughts; that man will never stop unleashing violence before introducing order to beleaguered souls.

Thus, he sent not a conquering King to wipe out a corrupt order and establish “peace” but someone from a long line of shepherds. His ways are not our ways.

The biblical Joseph, who eventually saved Egypt, was a shepherd. David, the greatest king ever, was another shepherd of Jesus’ bloodline. The patriarch Abraham, who started it all, was a shepherd.

In Paulo Coelho’s magnum opus The Alchemist, the mysterious Melchizedek and Arab sages appear to remind the protagonist, a shepherd boy, that his treasure hunt was a quest worthy of shepherds. The Divine favors shepherds and one from among them even became the King of Kings, so he was told.

The Way of the Shepherd

Shepherds lead their flock to green pastures and still waters, though a narrow and winding path, whenever necessary. The path less-trodden is a metaphor for a way of life.

Think of the denouement in the Sound of Music, of children clambering up an Alpine redoubt, and it is comforting to hope that in fiery trials, there may appear a shepherd to lead the stricken to safety.

Furthermore, the permanence of the pastoral setting is the antithesis of the human Ziggurat. The latter crumbles eventually, needing bailouts in their trillions for a “reconstruction project.” It is all glitzy and expensive, needing blood for cement, bones for bricks, sweat for mortars, and tears for failing.

I would rather think of a manger, of a real menagerie with horses, mules, donkeys and — a long time back — the baby Jesus himself. At least for now. His first honored visitors were coincidentally…shepherds.

And what about Dec 25?

The year of Jesus birth has been rightly contested and there is no way he could have been born on Dec 25. The activity of the shepherds, who were informed of his birth, suggest an earlier month, preferably September. Nine months prior would have been December when the word became flesh (conceived), as the Bible puts it.

This then is the shocker: Dec 25 may have been the date of Jesus’ conception. There is a growing body of research which indicate this, after traditions are detached from their dubious dogma. For a quick synoptic account, follow the shepherd’s trail at Michaemas and see where that leads…

Merry Christmas everyone!

Kuala Lumpur, Dec 21, 2008

Copyright 2008 – Mathew Maavak

Most of Mathew Maavak’s commentaries can be read here or visit the Panoptic World homepage.