An open letter to Scrooge McTrump

[TexasTowelie]

Happy Holidays
By Jeremy Rutledge


It's a cold holiday season in America. Not in terms of the weather in the Lowcountry, where our winters are so mild we can barely put on our coats and scarves without overheating, but in terms of the overall climate in the country. Last weekend the Republican Senate passed a tax bill designed to redistribute wealth to the very richest while kicking kids off the Children's Health Insurance Program and passing them a one trillion dollar tab. It's hard to think of a more Scrooge-like piece of legislation, but apparently Fox News and Breitbart don't do literary allusions. Dickens who?

Just after the bill passed, the White House was decorated to look like the spitting image of the white witch's castle in Narnia. Outside the Christmas tree was lit to a half-empty gathering reminiscent of that dismal inauguration in January. The president, for his part, continues to threaten war and evade prosecution for everything from the sexual misconduct he once boasted about to the Russian collusion his former national security adviser may have just copped to. And his response to this bleak moment in our history is to wish us all Merry Christmas.

Of course, the president doesn't really mean Merry Christmas in either the Dickensian or the Christian sense — the former requiring a change of heart from miserliness to mercy, the latter spreading the distinctly counter-cultural messages of Peace on Earth and Good Will to All. What the president means is to divide us by culture and creed. When he says Merry Christmas, he's throwing red meat to his base of white evangelical Christians while throwing shade at the rest of the country. Our best response to this divisive tactic is to answer his Merry Christmas with a Happy Holidays.

Saying Happy Holidays acknowledges that we are a people of many faiths, philosophies, and traditions. It says that we embrace our pluralism and find in it a greater wisdom. In my own life in Charleston, my dearest friends are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and humanist. We say different things in our houses of worship or during significant seasons, but in our life together we say Happy Holidays. This unites us in well wishing and common acts of kindness. The other day after checking out at the pharmacy, the woman at the register, who I see often, smiled brightly and wished me Happy Holidays. I wished her the same. And it was a lovely, human moment. I do not know her religious preference or her cultural background, but I know that I wish her well this season and wish to express it.

Read more: https://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/an-open-letter-to-scrooge-mctrump/Content?oid=13761150

[Angry Dragon]

1. In Trumpworld only wealthy people exist