HOLLY DAYS

Today is the first Holly Day of 2021, Unity. We chose this day, December 21st, because it is usually the day on which the winter solstice occurs, and this year it does, at 15:59 UTC, which has just passed as I write this. The solstice is an instantaneous event, marking the moment when the sun reaches and passes directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, and meaning that from today on, the days will grow longer and longer in the northern hemisphere. It is the moment that most literally symbolizes the rebirth of of the world, at least on my half of it.

We stole Unity as the first principal of Holly Days from my old anthro prof at Cal State LA, Maulana, nee Ron, Karenga, who set his first day of Kwanzaa as Umoja, Unity. I mean, don’t all stories really start with “Gather Round”?

I’ve heard that after WW2, intelligence officers who had been dubbed “The Martians” and successfully coordinated the Ghost Army and fake D-Day Invasion at Calais, mused about continuing the group to fake an actual Martian invasion to thwart the growing cold war, reasoning that a common enemy could reunite the bickering superpowers in the same way that the the Nazis had made them allies. Not sure where I heard that, or how apocryphal it might be, but the common enemy is a tried-and-true tactic to spur a diverse group into collective action. Aesop and Patrick Henry, to name a few, have warned us that ‘united we stand and divided we fall’. But what about when two collectives face off against each other? Unity to one, is division from the other.

To win, each side tries to unify their cohort by cementing the bonds between their members, often by identifying and exaggerating a common opponent. And so it has been with our two political tribes, be that Right vs Left, Republican vs the Democrat or Liberal vs Conservative. Of course the nature of the feedback created by new media has left our ideological PA’s screaming at ear-splitting levels, pushing each pole back until it has become more like Maoist vs Fascist. Neither of those movements turned out all that well, so maybe we need to reposition the mics and turn down the volume a bit.

Soldiers are built by dehumanizing the enemy and putting them in the face of mortal danger. Our well-meaning activists, desperate to mobilize their bases, are using the same strategy of dehumanization and terror. In a world that can’t seem to help getting more peaceful and prosperous by the year (as so meticulously detailed by Pinker in his Enlightenment Now among many many others making the same observations about modernity) activists often use hyperbole and outright falsehoods to frighten their tribemates and get them up off their couches.

On the right, a crime and disease-ridden invasion of bad hombres across our southern border, and an anarchist conspiracy eating away at our cities from the inside. On the left a range of malicious isms and phobias that infect and destroy every aspect of our lives, and an open season on innocent black men. The trumpist right has the benefit of a completely cynical and manufactured propaganda machine that has spiraled so completely out of control that the million decibels of feedback coming out of their speakers has resulted in almost total deafness of the folks too near the stage whose claims of pedophilic cannibalism by the opposing side have left hyperbole far behind and veered into near madness. To counter, the left has pitched its own phantasms such as the complete fiction of Hands Up Don’t Shoot.

I don’t think the claim that democrats are serving baby-sausage pizzas really needs rebuttal. It’s a delusion driving some folks to the dark side, but it does not represent the same sort of erosion of civil mores emanating from the big lie about election fraud (thankfully being routinely called out by most professional media). Sadly, claims like hands up don’t shoot, which are rarely questioned in professional media, also have a corrosive effect on the our ability to inhabit a shared moral universe. The claim that Michael Brown was shot by police officer Darren Wilson as he was standing with his hands up and pleading “don’t shoot” was made by some witnesses who wished to help assure the prosecution of Wilson. Many of these witnesses later admitted that they had made it up, and it was contradicted by numerous other witnesses, most of them Black themselves. Nevertheless it became a rallying cry of activists seeking social justice.

We’ve all seen film of both Allied and Nazi soldiers marching safely with their hands up in surrender and in countless cowboy and gangster narratives where ‘hand’s up’ ends the violence. To suggest that such a long-standing social contract had now been abandoned by police when it was once respected by Nazi’s, the archetype of evil, was to suggest a level of lawlessness that surely could only be remedied by abolishing the police, or even by revolution. Of course it did get them off their couches, but at what price? The big lie got that tribe off their couches, and we saw what that price was, and we watched as neighborhoods were burned by desperate folks who may have just not been able to bear the thought that even with their hands up, they would be murdered by their own government.

I recently heard a now-common trope: “If the Jan 6th insurrectionists had been POC, they would have been mowed down!” But they were POC in Kenosha, and they were not mowed down, in fact the only folks ‘mowed down’ in Kenosha were some white guys by another white guy. There is no way to replay history with a different set of variables, so there is no way to know what would have happened if…, but the certainty that folks bring to this dubious idea of people being in danger of being mowed down by their own government is partly a extension of falsehoods and exaggerations like hands up don’t shoot.

The worst part of it is that POC, believing these narratives, now live in an unrealistic terror of imminent violence. This will be hardest on the population already hardest hit by social injustice, black boys, still in the relatively safe arms of their families, already having tasted the bitterness of racism though still largely inexperienced in the actual ways of the world, which they now imagine to be utterly hostile to them. No boy should ever have to live in such terror.

If we met a boy who had been bitten by a dog, and was then understandably afraid of dogs, we would not say to them, “dogs are vicious predators who will attack and kill you whenever they can!” We would say, “I know you’re scared and were hurt, but not all dogs are like that, many are sweet and kind, just be careful with them?” When we tell boys “hands up don’t matter, they’ll shoot” or that it is “open season on black men, they’ll mow you down” we are doing them great harm, which the expediencies of social activism just do not justify.

Let’s all take a step back, lower our voices and try to reach out in common humanity with those with whom we may disagree. Today is Unity, Happy Holly Days one and all!