1st Annual X-mas Letter

Dear High Elf,

I’m addressing this letter to you mainly because I know how busy your boss (you know, the fellow in red?) is this week, and I really don’t want to piss him off, if you know what I mean. Besides, we Faeries can relate to you Elves, and I’m faerly sure you’ll pass the word along to the Big Guy when the moment seems right, not to mention the fact that you Elves seldom get letters addressed to yours’elves… but anyway…

This was the year when surreality took over and things got very weird for us here in the United States, and I imagine in the rest of the world, as well. It all started back in February with some governmental recommendations for plastic sheeting and duct tape… sounds kinky, doesn’t it?… well, kinky is what it wasn’t, believe me. I would have preferred kinky to what actually happened…

The following month, we began bombing the hell out of and killing people in Iraq, and buzzwords like “shock and awe” and “weapons of mass destruction” were bantied about on every single form of mass media in the world. (Imagine what this has done to the minds of our children?!?) Mass hysteria and paranoia originating from our nations’ leaders quickly led people to passively allow their governments to destroy the rights and privacy that our nations’ soldiers and sailors had fought and died for in two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War. The reasons given for starting this war and killing all these people changed as quickly as the wind changed direction, and so far, every reason given has sort of fizzled away into some sort of deluded hallucination of our leaders in Washington and London. Many people, even today, still believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the planes crashing into the World Trade Center 9/11/2001, even though there is not one shred of evidence to back up that belief… but, I guess they don’t need actual reasons to feel insecure and paranoid, do they? Especially when they’ve got the television telling them nightly what to be afraid of.

Yes, the people here are rather strange, Mr. High Elf, much stranger than you and your fellow Elves could possibly guess. Just the other day, they decided they wanted to engender even more paranoia and insecurity in the country and raised the Threat Level to orange, which means we all should be Highly worried about even more threats from anyone who is not “one of us” and, yet, in the same breath, they urged people to go on with their holiday plans as if nothing unusual were taking place. I don’t know which is scarier, the threat of attack from without, or the insanity of my government from within. It’s a toss-up.

Over the past year, we’ve been assured by our leaders that in return for being “safer” we were being required to surrender a lot of what it means to be American citizens… the right to speak freely, the right to be secure and private in our homes, the right to an attorney, the right to know the charges against us, the right to a speedy trial (or even any trial at all), etc. People have been taken from their homes and whisked off to “detention camps” in Cuba. Some people just plain disappeared and haven’t been heard from since… there are rumors that these people were taken to Syria where it’s common to beat and torture information out of prisoners… plus, it wouldn’t make the United States “look bad” in the eyes of the world community. Perhaps I think too much about these things, but I have a hard time sleeping at night sometimes, wondering about all the things that might be happening that we haven’t yet heard about… wondering if there is any way to get us all out of this mess we’ve let out leaders get us into.

Despite the drama these government leaders provoke, there’s not much to be said about a populace that would elect The Terminator to serve as their state governor, though Total Recall of all our elected officials might be in order soon if things keep going as they have been. The paradoxical thing this past year, however, is that we held the world’s largest, most vocal peace protest marches ever before held in human history, though you wouldn’t know it from the press’ lack of coverage of the events. Other people actually stood in front of bulldozers, and some died in the attempt to prevent Israelis from demolishing houses to make way for the wall being built in Palestine. And of all people, those unassuming individuals who received no press attention whatsoever, our librarians, fought to protect our rights from the abuses of the government’s Patriot Act at every turn. These things should be completely unnecessary, but yeah, there it is.

In some ways it reminded me a bit of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata — a play that should remind us all that anti-war movements are as old as war itself. And yet… anyone who protested this war was immediately labelled un-American, un-patriotic, or being of aid to a tyrannical dictator… and we were told “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” by leaders who had never once picked up a rifle in combat themselves. I guess it’s true, what they say… “When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.” I just never wanted to believe that that was true… but after this year, I have to.

By now you must be wondering why I am writing this letter to you, Mr. High Elf… but you see, I felt I had to preface my request with a recounting of all the craziness of the past year so that you would understand where I’m coming from. What I would like is for your boss, that jolly fellow in red, to be aware of what’s been done in the name of “democracy” and what effect that has and will have in the minds of children everywhere for the next thirty years or more. You see, I believe that they’re in need of some extra special attention from Himself… perhaps he could see to it that each child (of every age, even us forty-five year olds) could get at least one gift from their holiday wish lists, and perhaps leave behind a parcel of food and a bottle of drinking water, as well. You see, in this insane world we now find ourselves in, we produce enough food to feed every single person, and yet, there is food being wasted, thrown in landfills, dumped into the sea, and STILL, there are people starving to death. So, if he could do something about that, even for one night, myself and a lot of other people could sleep peacefully and not lie awake that night, thinking about all of this.

Thank you.

Your friend,
�ine