For multiple years now, I have argued that Constantine and the Church completely miscalculated the date we celebrate Christmas. Rather than honoring the birth of Christ at the end of December, the Upstate New Yorker in me has long reasoned that the end of February would have been a much better choice. While it was unlikely for a Roman emperor to consider the climate of the Northeast region of a continent yet to be discovered, placing the holiday at the beginning of the winter season rather than the end is an inexcusable mistake.
Most people are familiar with the concept of post-holiday blues, the idea that following the holidays one can feel isolated, sad, and low on energy. The traveling and increased financial burden from the holiday season can add an increased amount of stress to one’s life. Couple that with the fact that one is expected to return back to their normal routine following days of celebration with their closest family and friends, and it makes it no surprise that a lot of people feel down at the onset of the New Year.
Unfortunately for us in the northern part of the globe, it gets no easier. Two months of winter’s coldest and darkest days are eager to keep you inside, sedentary, and tired.
Yet the Romans decided without my insight, and as is predictably the case with those who disagree with me, they were wrong. If you sent out a poll to your nearest, dearest friends and family, I would wager at least half would say that January is their least favorite month, and that is one of many mainstream opinions I do share. Every year, as the joy of the holidays comes and goes, I will warn both myself and others to prepare for the two months of doom ahead, claiming that you never really realize how miserable you are until it’s spring and warm again. You then look back at the previous several weeks and ask yourself several questions ranging from “Why do I live in the northern part of the country?” to “How did I not kill myself?” depending on the brutality of the season you just endured.
Yet this January, it seems as if I need not wait for the season to pass to understand the despair I am feeling on a day-to-day basis. Even in my fantasyland of a February Christmas, the anticipation and excitement surrounding the holiday season would not save me from the doom and gloom of our everyday situation.
The right to assemble and protest peacefully is an ideal that was consistently glorified and reinforced throughout my childhood. As a proud Yankee boy, I was fortunate enough to be educated in the New York State public school system and was probably exposed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as early as the first grade. The right to protest injustice peacefully, and subsequently the assuredness of its effectiveness, was a common topic of conversation each January during elementary (pronounced eL-uh-men-tare-ree) school.
The ideal was consistent in other themes as well, as I can vividly recall Mrs. Hart emphasizing the significance of the Nazi crackdown on the right to peacefully assemble whilst our class read Number the Stars in sixth grade. The righteous act of peacefully protesting was further drilled into us in high school, as we learned about Gandhi’s use of the tactic during our Global Studies curriculum, and then of the Freedom Riders, diner sit-ins, and various other examples during the 1960s in the American South during our middle school and eleventh-grade history courses. While the context and examples of the protests may have changed depending on the classroom or the course curriculum, the underlying principle never changed. The right to peaceful protest is an integral part of our society, a right entitled to us not only legally through the U.S. Constitution, but in human nature itself. And it was a right worth fighting and dying for.
Some days during my sixth-grade year, when school ended, I would walk the half-mile back to my childhood home because I could not stand to wait for my mother to finish talking, or copying, or planning, as teachers do in the minutes that follow after a school day. During basketball season, I would often walk a much shorter distance to St. Johnsville High School to watch my father’s basketball team practice, harass some players, and participate in the more elementary drills. One December day was presumably too cold to walk home. My father’s basketball team must have had a game, or late practice, or perhaps my mother assured me she would not be sticking around long after the bell, so I waited in her classroom, as I often did, until she was ready to drive us home. The reason for me sticking around to wait for her I cannot remember; what I can remember is her fighting back tears as she told me someone shot up a first-grade classroom earlier that day. Not really sure if that was the prime opportunity or situation to break the news to me, but I did not really grasp in the moment exactly what had happened. It was quite obvious in her tone that it was something serious.
Lockdown drills were common throughout my entire elementary school experience, nearly as common as the more traditional fire drill. When I was in fourth or fifth grade, we actually had a real lockdown; someone found a couple of shotgun shells in the boys’ bathroom, or that is how the rumor goes. So please do not fact-check me. The lockdown drills were always explained to us in quite a vanilla, tactful way. Perhaps I was just a naïve idiot, as school shootings had happened prior to Sandy Hook, but alas, eleven-year-old Jack could not really conceptualize the purpose behind the need to practice hiding in a classroom. However, the Sandy Hook tragedy became a story that my virgin eyes could not avoid. Three months later, my classmates and I got a taste of a real lockdown.
In March of the following year, there was a mass shooting in Herkimer, New York, another small town about twenty minutes west of good ole Johnyville. My sixth-grade class, with the images of Sandy Hook fresh on the brain, was locked down in Ms. Esford’s music room. After several minutes came and went, it became clear to us all that this wasn’t just a drill. Some more time passed, and then over the PA we heard the announcement that if anyone had heard from or seen our beloved homeroom teacher, Mrs. Hart (I believe she went home for lunch or stepped out of the school. It was her planning/lunch period after all; we were at music!), to please contact the main office immediately. Not entirely sure why those in the main office thought it was a good idea to tell a locked-down school of children that a teacher was missing over the PA, but I am sure you can imagine the shift in mood poor Ms. Esford had to deal with. Other than me stupidly trying to reason with Ms. Esford that the most logical plan if someone tried to enter the room was to climb out the window and run to the police station (always was a runner, not a fighter), I do not remember much regarding the several hours that passed after we entered lockdown. Eventually, around 3:30, we were released from school, with our parents having to come into the school and pick us up individually as a precautionary measure, since the shooter was still on the loose.
The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School occurred my junior year of high school, and I, as well as many others of similar age, decided to finally utilize that golden ticket of peaceful protest that so many people had fought and died to give us. A few of my closest friends and two of our mothers piled into our minivan and set sail to attend the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C. We participated in the whole lot: marching, chanting, making signs, listening to speeches. The whole day was quite reminiscent of the peaceful marches we became familiar with during our time in school. Yet despite every subsequent protest that followed, despite every perfect Instagram Story graphic, despite the fact that over 90% of Americans supported stricter gun laws in some capacity, and despite every circular conversation with the idiots in English class who argued there could be absolutely no restrictions on firearms because they personally needed them in order to protect themselves from an imaginary tyrannical government, despite the fact they couldn’t hit a decoy duck from ten yards away. The radical change that was supposed to occur when a mass of the populace all believed in something and protested peacefully did not come to fruition.
Following the aforementioned events, one does begin to wonder if peaceful protest is the most effective way to enact change. Obviously, a government is not going to have its public schools teach a curriculum that emphasizes, “If you do not like the way we are treating you, please violently rebel against us.” Perhaps glorifying peaceful protest, which is a much more minor inconvenience when compared to the guillotine, is the way to give citizens an outlet without much pressure being exerted on the powers that be to make any substantial change. However, it of course cannot be this cynical. Following the peaceful protests led by Dr. King, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. And the curriculum in public schools has no issue transfiguring the actions of the American patriots and their violent acts leading up to the Revolution. It must be something else.
Learning about the right to protest and peacefully assemble goes hand in hand with learning of the actions taken by the American colonists leading up to the War for Independence. I would wager that if you polled the American public on whether the Revolution was a righteous and justified act, over 80% (the exact number isn’t important) would likely respond yes. I implore them to dig a little deeper and ask at what exact moment the line is drawn in the sand and the fight becomes just. What were the principles the colonists were fighting for that justified the violence? Was it the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the Boston Massacre, the tax on tea, when shots rang out at the Battle of Lexington and Concord? Or perhaps it was the principles that were worth fighting for: the right to autonomous government? Or maybe no taxation without representation?
Fast forward through American history another eighty or so years and we find ourselves at another violent conflict, one that would likely be deemed similarly justifiable to the public, as long as you do not get an exorbitant amount of Lost Causers in your sample. I once again ask: at which moment was the violence justified? In the autumn of 1859, John Brown was hanged for attempting to violently overthrow the institution of slavery. Eighteen months later, the American president and federal military attempted to do the same thing. History vindicates.
I implore you to imagine yourself in each of those times and think of some of the opinions that one could find in the years, months, and days leading up to the wars that followed. Mind you, the British soldiers killed five Americans on a Boston (BANNED!) street in 1770; it took five more years for the war to begin. Bleeding Kansas, a series of violent conflicts in the territories of Kansas and Missouri as the entire country tried to decide if they would be entered into the Union as free or slave states, began in 1854. It took seven more years for the Civil War to begin.
Perhaps you think you would hear some of the following:
· “Well yeah, I think you can protest. But if you stand around screaming at a bunch of soldiers while throwing snowballs and rocks at them, obviously you’re going to get shot. FAFO.”
· “I don’t get why these patriots are so upset about the British Army quartering in their homes. What do they have to hide? If it was me, I would just comply.”
· “Sure, I don’t like the fact that the British Army killed several militiamen and destroyed a bunch of our weaponry, but if you think we can win a war against the most powerful empire in the world, you’re insane.”
· “I personally do not agree with slavery, but we do not have to kill each other over it. Let’s let cooler heads prevail and hope this all blows over.”
· “The rebels in South Carolina are idiots for firing on Fort Sumter, but I really hope war can be avoided and we can return to a sense of normalcy.”
I had never considered the fact that many people held these opinions until I was out of high school. Sure, there were American Loyalists loyal to the Crown, and sure, there were those who chose to side with the rebels during the Civil War, but the average citizen who just wanted any outcome that would keep their current life from being disrupted is not one covered often in history books. Or maybe it was because these people were far more rare; the enlightened, condescending, pacifist grandstanding that is so common in American society today does seem to be a recent development pushed by the media and both political parties over the last thirty years. Go listen to WWII music - everyone wanted Hitler dead. Today they’d write a song fantasizing about his trial. But one must consider the fact that there were many people like this during those times, so where would you have drawn the line in the sand? Where would the three-time Trump voter draw his lines?
Surely the fight for independence was noble and righteous and just. Perhaps the MAGA man cannot pinpoint an exact example, for they all appear to be a bit contradictory to the actions they currently support and defend. For if law enforcement shooting protesters was reason enough for revolution, they best get planning.
So it must be the right to self-governance and defying a colonizing force that justified the fight. I’m so very sure their opinion on the Vietnam War, Korean War, Israeli treatment toward Palestine, Ukrainian-Russian War, and countless regime changes across the Middle East and South America are aligned with this.
Finding contradiction in Republican politics really is not my point here; I’ve been doing that for, like, fifteen years. My main objective is to take our current situation and compare it relative to other conflicts in history that nearly all Americans view as just fights. It’s easy to get caught up and not realize how dire and crazy of a situation we find ourselves in, given how gradually every insane act or talking point in American politics has shifted in the last ten years. So I’ll lay it out like this: if you polled the American public in 2015 and stated, “Would you take action (ambiguous on purpose) against the federal government if they committed the following actions”:
· a masked special police force abducting people into unmarked vans and not releasing the names of the captured
· said special police force killing two protesters in the street
· the sitting president saying, “You can’t have guns”
· said special police force tear-gassing a preschool
· said special police force using a five-year-old child as bait to abduct a child
· American citizens being scared to leave their homes, go to work, or go to the grocery store due to fear of abduction
· the federal government trying to coerce a state into turning over their voter rolls
· supporters of said special police force attacking a congresswoman at a town hall
· aerial footage of hundreds of prisoners in a detention center, who have been denied due process, screaming for help
· detainees dying in said detention centers
· the federal government ignoring court rulings in regard to these acts
Come on. Fighting this imaginary government is a Republican’s wet dream. In 2015, one could not imagine this, and while we sit and experience it today, it seems so fathomable.
At what point do the “we’re at a point where you are complicit if you do not say something” Instagram stories turn into “you are complicit if you do not do something”? At what point leading up to the Revolutionary War did the kids stop the IG posts and decide to act? That’s the question I do not have the answer to. In 1940s Europe, did you have to smell the burning flesh from the concentration camps to say enough was enough, or did you actually have to witness the mass killings with your own eyes? When did they decide it was a righteous fight?
As we sat there in Mrs. Hart’s sixth-grade room reading Number the Stars, I, as well as many others exposed to Holocaust content around this age, wondered how something so grotesque was allowed to happen. Something like this could never happen again, I so assuredly thought. But at the same time, few things are capable of enraging me more than those stupid-ass “If you ever wondered how you would have acted during (insert bad time), you’re doing it now” graphics. As if the average Vermont farmer was capable of marching right down south himself and killing Jefferson Davis whilst simultaneously ending the institution of slavery. Or a resistance German was capable of infiltrating the Nazi government, killing Hitler, and ending the reign of fascism in Europe.
In not-so-dissimilar fashion, the romanticization of our current political climate is another top-tier “let’s rage-bait Jack” strategy. “Why yes, our times are so dire, but this is not a novel human experience. People have been suffering for all of humanity. We must go to the club, on a date, to the theater; we cannot let them kill our spirit.” Poor us! We have to go drink $23 drinks surrounded by the hottest people in the country and dance to Ke$ha because we just cannot deal with the injustices we witness on our phone.
And I am one of the biggest culprits of them all. Last week, as I once again tried to ignore the creeping feeling of cognitive dissonance, the hardest decision I had to make was whether, after spending the previous two days frolicking in the snow, I should go to the Lion’s Bar for one of the best burgers in New York, or go home and cook a rustic Sunday tomato sauce. In our current environment, right and wrong is clearer than some of the other conflicts I mentioned throughout this. But myself, as well as others, are obviously struggling with what to do. The media and most mainstream politicians will push for de-escalation in Minnesota, and many people will likely think that’s a noble idea. Anything to prevent us from missing that dinner this weekend at Peter Luger, anything to keep the S&P at all-time highs.
And despite what twelve-year-old Jack could ever possibly imagine, I’m the guiltiest of us all. No amount of impending February Christmas excitement could change that.
In traditional condescending Gen Z lefty fashion, I managed to write 3000 words complaining about the lack of action of everyone including myself. Yet, failed to offer any meaningful solutions. I just hope we all can become aware of the fact we are all complicit, regardless if we are speaking up about these injustices or not. That is no longer enough.