<\/p>\n
Merry Christmas.<\/p>\n
It’s a holiday season and, though our family rejected religion and God
\nthree generations ago, we are still of Christian stock. The holiday is
\nobserved, a tree goes up, gifts are exchanged. The eggnog rolls out
\nand, just as Christ did, my uncle giggles maniacally as he spikes it
\nwith rum and brandy and scotch. Personally, I think that’s a little
\nover the top and just this side of nauseating. You don’t quite notice
\nit after the fourth one, though. In fact, you can stick needles through
\nthe webs of your fingers after the fourth one.<\/p>\n
So that’s Christmas and, barring the alcohol, I haven’t quite
\ngotten to the cheer part. Let’s go to the kitchen table, beneath the
\nglaring lights of the fluorescents, and dinner has run the courses. We
\nall sit in varying stages of alcoholic glee when my grandmother sighs
\nheavily and the Christmas cheer begins.<\/p>\n
“The relief of Bastogne. Christmas Eve, 1944.” She pauses and the
\nlights seem to dim around us. Someone’s gonna die, baby, and you know
\nit ain’t good. My grandfather goes silent. The mere mention of those
\nyears tends to roll the nightmares back into his bed and bring a
\ntremolo to his voice. His dreams are filled with Japanese torpedoes,
\nand friends lying dead on those silly islands. Something in Europe,
\nthough, is a rare story, and the first my grandmother has spoken of
\nthem.<\/p>\n
“It was in a place called Eschdorf, I think. Don’t even know where it is.”<\/p>\n
“What is this?” That’s my uncle. Quick to draw the old folks back from the edge.<\/p>\n
“Oscar Lewis. In Eschdorf, Christmas Eve, killed by the Germans.” She
\nlooked over her glasses. “My first love. They sent all my letters back
\nto me.” She touched her glass, eyes watering, “Merry Christmas, Oscar.”<\/p>\n
He came out of Cairo, West Virginia. You pronounce that \u2018Karo’, like
\nthe syrup. Cairo had given many of her boys to the Confederates. The
\nwounds and the pain of that great war that changed America were still
\nwhispered when my grandmother’s letters went out to doomed Oscar Lewis,
\nfighting a war that would change us once again. He had two brothers –
\nGeorge and Marshall. George was retarded, so severely he lived in the
\nshadows of the Lewis homestead. Marshall, also at the push to relieve
\nBastogne during Hitler’s last offensive, was captured. He spent the
\nremainder of the war in a prison camp and, when he returned in the
\nautumn of 1945, he was barely a man. He would die young, his time in
\nthe camps never put into words, but they lived forever in his night
\nterrors.<\/p>\n
What were Oscar’s thoughts on this night, so long ago? I sit and I
\ndrink and I think of writing an article, but all the humors flow out of
\nme. There, in Eschdorf, the entrenched Germans met the hopeful
\nliberators of Bastogne. It was this town that had been under siege
\nsince the Battle of the Bulge began and we were just a hair away from
\nfailure. As the relief marched desperately, they met powerful
\nresistance and ended up getting pinned down in the surrounding
\nvillages. In Eschdorf, the Germans were ready. Our troops collided with
\nthem in the dark, frozen night of Christmas Eve and fell into a chaotic
\nbattle where every man fought for himself. Americans and Germans
\nscattered, fighting on the streets and in the houses, dodging each
\nother through the ruins and the shadows. The barns, the basements.
\nGerman tanks held the town square and fired blindly into the village,
\nkilling their own and ours. Those who survived have all said that they
\nnever killed a German who was further away than the reach of their arm.
\nMost would literally bump into their target and, friend or foe, shoot
\nor stab their way to the next pocket of shadows, the next wall of
\nsafety. Throughout Christmas Eve, we slaughtered our own, as well as
\nthe Germans. They, in turn, were no better off.<\/p>\n
Somewhere in that fray, in those shadows, Oscar Lewis bumped up against
\nfriend or foe and, in the darkness and the terror of war, his life
\nended.<\/p>\n
The fight for Eschdorf, some stupid little town that I don’t even see
\non the map, lasted for two days. With the dawn of Christmas morning,
\nand after a night of constant, blind battle, the best we could do was
\nlay low. If you moved, the snipers had you. The tanks had you. Towards
\nnightfall, reinforcements arrived and we renewed our offensive. The
\nGermans fell back, fighting for every inch, and were slowly flanked on
\ntheir eastern side. But, still, they lasted. Another night fell and our
\nreinforcements were scattered throughout the village, the line broken.
\nIt took until the evening of the 26th before Eschdorf fell.<\/p>\n
The Germans we were fighting were the same divisions that had marched
\non Paris, and then the Ukraine. They had taken the Caucasus Mountains
\nin 1942. They had escaped Stalingrad. The Ardennes Offensive broke
\nthem. Divisions shattered. It was a last ditch effort for the Third
\nReich, only a little over five months away from surrender.<\/p>\n
In all of that stood a boy from Cairo. My grandmother’s letters, of
\ncourse, sit somewhere down there in the crawlspace beneath our house.
\nYou can almost feel them, if you sit here where I am. A stack of
\nunopened, returned letters packed away down there with this family’s
\nmemories.<\/p>\n
It seems we never moved forward. That’s the curse of the World War II
\ngeneration. To sit there and spin away in the wind. Their eyes saw
\nthings that we can’t imagine. They carry names and faces in their
\nhearts that were ripped apart by people you and I only see as silly
\ntourists.<\/p>\n
And where did we go from there? To my uncle’s shaking hands in the
\nsmoke-shrouded jungles of Vietnam? To our own world today where we
\ncontinue, non stop, on a path of righteous murder?<\/p>\n
It’s Christmas in America. We, you and I, are so blind, so empty, so
\nignorant that we just continue on like livestock. We hold our loved
\nones close to our hearts, but do we ever explore each other? Is there
\ntime? We live paycheck to paycheck, the rent and the cable bill and the
\ninsurance digging into our brains and washing our souls of all purity.
\nDay in, day out, it’s the same walk. Today, we rest. Tomorrow, we hurry
\nback to work and we swallow the company line for a few bucks while the
\nboss walks away a rich man. Oscar Lewis is a man who never had that
\nopportunity. He died at 19.<\/p>\n
Many die. They circle around us and they continue to breathe in our
\nears even though their lives are gone. They all die and, in our time on
\nthis world, we will carry them to the grave with us. We will feel them
\nat every step. We will hear their voices in the night, and we will
\nsmell their perfume in the morning. Oscar Lewis died 59 years ago and,
\ntonight, he sat at our kitchen table. Today, he’s on Great Society.
\nAnother meaningless article that will soon bump down and vanish. Words
\nfrom another wage slave, another troubled mind, another silly boy who
\nis ten years older than Oscar Lewis was when he bit a German (or
\nAmerican) bullet on Christmas Eve, 1944. So what have I done? I’ve
\ndodged the bullets, I’ve lived here in the lap of luxury where
\neverything is provided. All these wounds I imagine, all these troubles
\nI cry for, and yet not a single thing really matters. Wake up, get out
\nof bed, make coffee, run to work, turn myself off for 10 hours a day,
\nevery day. When the holiday and the weekend moves my feet and awakens
\nmy mind, I’m too tired to care.<\/p>\n
This is our story isn’t it? This vast, terrible emptiness beneath us.
\nThese flashing signs telling us to max out every credit card, to live
\nbeyond our means, to suffocate ourselves with debt and constant work.
\nThis machine has gripped us, sucked us in, and it doesn’t even do
\nanything anymore. It doesn’t fight some great war. It doesn’t strive to
\nfeed the hungry, educate the poor, or bring enlightenment to our lives.
\nIt doesn’t push forward medicine and hope. Not for all of us. It feeds
\nonly those who designed it, and those who imagine themselves in charge
\nof it. It feeds only greed, prejudice, fear. We brought our own Towers
\ndown. You and I. The blood of each of those people, and all of the
\nothers throughout the world, should burn our tongues. Pennies in our
\nmouths. Taste them? Feel it going down? Don’t swallow too much. You
\nmight wake up.<\/p>\n
There are no answers, you know. No solutions. Nothing different that we
\ncan do. Yes, it is hopeless. Oscar Lewis, my grandmother’s first love,
\ndied so that you can surround yourself with gifts today. So that you
\ncan hurry back to work tomorrow, or perhaps Monday, and blindly pound
\nthrough the day for some paltry sum that you’ll spend on your useless,
\nnoisy townhouse far from the bus line. He died so that you can be cruel
\nto the man or woman next to you. He died so that you can forget your
\nown history. He died so that you can not have enough time to read a
\nbook or reflect on your life. He died so you could piss your youth away
\nin some cubical. God bless us all, Tiny Tim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[353,122,124],"class_list":["post-2447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008","tag-holidays","tag-nachos-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2447"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2908,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447\/revisions\/2908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}