Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, who has taught English and history for 30 years and writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
‘Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the house not a teacher was stirring, especially Poor Elijah and me. We’d put each other to sleep discussing standards-based grading while everybody else trimmed the tree.
Don’t get the wrong idea. Poor Elijah likes to make merry at Christmas. He also gets reflective, particularly when he’s screening his all-time favorite movie, “A Christmas Carol.” Naturally, we’re talking about the classic Alastair Sim version, of which Poor Elijah happens to possess his own 16 millimeter film copy, complete with clicking sprocket holes and occasionally warbling sound.
Those of you who’ve made a more graceful transition to the 21st century most likely already know that this, the finest Scrooge of all, is also available digitally. True reactionaries, of course, stubbornly insist on reading the story out loud the way Dickens had to before our forefathers figured out how to plug things in.
Anyway, you probably know the story. Ebenezer Scrooge, the covetous old sinner, is offered a chance to learn a lesson and change his ways. This is where the three famous ghosts take their turns. Scrooge gets to ponder where he’s come from in the Past, where he truly is in the Present, and where he and those around him are likely to end in the Future if his miserable course and miserly habits remain unaltered.
It’s not a pretty picture. Scrooge beholds himself dead and discarded and the Cratchits brokenhearted without their Tiny Tim. That’s when he changes. That’s when he stands on his head and halloos out the window and dances with his niece and buys Bob Cratchit a new coal scuttle.
Some would say Scrooge comes to his senses. Others would say he repents. Back at the office the day after Christmas, Bob Cratchit no doubt considered that his boss had been transformed.
Had you encountered Scrooge that next day, you might well have seen him as a new man, too. But looking at Scrooge through the eyes the ghosts give us, it’s more that he’s become the man he always could have been. The new way he learns is simply the old way he’d always known but somehow had forgotten.
Change is often like that. There is nothing new under the sun.
I don’t mean to idealize the past. My father grew up during the Depression, and my mother sent him off to war at 20. A decade later I hid under my fifth grade desk, waiting for mushroom clouds. Education restructuring meant a fire bomb in an Alabama schoolhouse. I harbor my share of illusions, but the past was definitely a flawed place.
The past does teach me lessons, but it’s the values that endure through human history that command my attention. Anyone who supposes that human nature has changed should read Genesis. It’s all there – good and evil, wisdom and folly, the noble and the fallen.
If we’ve changed since I can first remember, it’s not because we’ve lost our former perfection. It’s been a painfully long time since we had it to lose. And it’s not because all our old ideas were good ones. They weren’t. It’s more that we’ve misplaced those treasures we stored up in our finer moments, those traits and decencies and habits of conscience we used to call good, the way we pictured ourselves at what we called our best.
It’s even the way we lied to ourselves when we fell short of the picture. I regret hypocrisy, especially in me. But I would rather that we know and care enough about right and wrong so we feel compelled to lie about our faults than see us forget how to blush.
We are presently at sea in a maelstrom of willful blindness and moral cowardice. Deceit and expediency have become our common currency. Our great men posture, slouch, and shrug. In our arrogance we’ve forgotten that Destiny and Reckoning aren’t ours to command. Life and death, hunger and want, mothers and fathers and children, love, hard work, humor, honesty, learning, perseverance, valor, fidelity – these are fundamental, ancient, and everlasting. It is to these that we need to look for guidance, strength, and solace.
Some propose instead that we adapt, that we meet extremism with extremism and militancy with militancy. They contend that it’s folly to long for bygone virtues and rudiments of character that seem sadly quaint in the glare of this morning’s breaking-news Twitter view of human existence. The world has changed, they insist, and we need to change with it.
Never. I can’t be that pessimistic.
The mountain issues we see at the dawn of this millennium are less than the fine dust. We have a child’s view of time and a fool’s view of our own self-importance.
A moment and an age ago in a day at least as frightening as our own, Abraham Lincoln called on us to heed the better angels of our nature. He believed there were times when we mortals could be restored to something nobler than we seemed to be. I suspect Mr. Lincoln would have understood Scrooge.
And me. And maybe you.
So with due respect for Mr. Lincoln, and with the thought that these perhaps are times like his, please accept this season’s greeting and salute from Poor Elijah and me, from our better angels to yours.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: Our better angels.