However unequal, broken and divided our country becomes, there are always people who do something to bring us back from the brink. A stem cell donor, perhaps, or spending a couple of hours of time with an older, lonely person. It’s the little things in life that matter because little things have a habit of turning into bigger things. With Christmas less than two months away, people like to show some festive spirit by doing something nice. So, it’s very heartening to see people preparing for Christmas by helping the less fortunate.
One relatively recent initiative has seen us prepare Christmas boxes for children. We sometimes forget, don’t we, that millions of children in our supposedly rich country have to manage with very little. It’s certainly something I can relate to when I was a child. Even the cheapest, most modest of presents meant the world to me and I never forgot it. And in my own, usually private, way I’ve tried to put something back into society that I was unable to do as a child. I don’t know if it makes me feel good because the idea of people in general but children in particular having nothing at Christmas makes me sad and dispirited. So I can well imagine the joy children will feel when they are provided with gifts at Christmas from kindly strangers who they will never meet.
My partner and I never thought that was enough and like many people we make a weekly donation to a charity, in our case a food bank because hunger is not just for Christmas. That is to say it’s something kind of wonderful to make a child happy at Christmas and there’s something else you can do, too, every week for the price of a few litres of fuel or a pint in your local. We do not think we are somehow great people for making a charity donation because even the very worst people in our country give to charity but while we have a government that doesn’t give a toss about poverty and starvation, we can at least take some form of limited action to make things less bad.
Because we can, we do stuff for Christmas and we do stuff all year round. And it’s so easy. We do our shopping on line from Morrisons and you can make a voluntary donation to a food bank, 100% of which reaches its target. I suppose it’s indirect action, not direct action, but I am taking steps to do that, too in a variety of different ways. Again, not because I am somehow a wonderful person or better than you, but because I’ve been lucky. I somehow escaped relative poverty, I remember what it was like and I wouldn’t like it to happen to anyone else.
In the end, it will come down to us, the people, to choose whether we want to be governed by people who are happy for children to go without food and without Christmas presents or we decide that actually we’re a bit better than that. We can change the world if we believe in justice and freedom.
Thanks to Graham Nash for the inspiration.
