“Poor Elijah’s Almanack” is written by Peter Berger of Mount Holly, who taught English and history for 30 years.
Every year in the darkest days, “A Christmas Carol” finds its way to Poor Elijah’s desk. It’s equally the way of things that every Christmas Eve Ebenezer Scrooge visits his past, his present, and his likely future escorted by three spirits.
As my friend and I travel with them, we see Scrooge for the grasping, covetous old sinner he is. We see him disown his sister’s only child. We see him foreclose on strangers and friends. We hear him dismiss pleas for charity by proposing that the poor should die and “decrease the surplus population.”
We hear him break his promise to his fiancée Alice, and in his pursuit of wealth and standing, his changed heart breaks hers. We witness the grinding poverty his greed imposes on the Cratchit family. When those hardships take Tiny Tim’s life in the prospective future, his family’s grief conjures our own.
And when Scrooge sees himself die alone and unmourned, we even grieve with him. Which is why when he wakes repentant and reclaimed on Christmas morning, we rejoice with him.
We rejoice at Scrooge’s rekindled generosity and decency. We rejoice as he seeks his nephew’s forgiveness. We rejoice when Tiny Tim lives.
We rejoice that Scrooge has heard his better angels.
Because they’re our better angels, too.
All this always stirs Poor Elijah, but the specter who moves my friend most is the ghost of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s late partner in business and heartlessness. Marley warns Scrooge that the three spirits who will visit him offer his only hope of escaping Marley’s unceasing sorrow.
As Marley leaves, he calls Scrooge to the bedchamber window. Outside in the darkness, a woman and her infant child huddle on a doorstep. All around them, human phantoms wail inconsolably. Before Marley joins them, he explains their ghostly lament: “They seek to interfere for good in human matters and have lost their power forever.”
Stop here, please, and read that again. Think what it means to lose your power to help, to do good, to ease suffering. Then count the hours in Forever.
I can remember hurtful words I spoke 60 years ago. I recall precisely where I was standing, and I can see the startled pain on my classmate’s face. I can’t take it back, and I can’t make it better.
Sixty years is a long time, but it’s nowhere near forever.
It isn’t death alone that can rob us of our power. There are other ways to earn “the incessant torture of remorse.” Sometimes what’s been broken by our careless thoughts and deeds simply can’t be unbroken. Sometimes the cost of our transgressions goes beyond personal loss and private pain.
I’m talking about the part we’re each playing in our nation’s present peril.
I’m talking about our government by the people, our democratic republic, our representative democracy. No capital letters, no political parties — just we the people and the government we fairly and freely choose.
Before you object that insurrection, attempted coups, and looming civil strife aren’t suitable topics for a Christmas musing, Dickens intended “A Christmas Carol” as a commentary on child labor and poverty, neither of which convey much Christmas cheer.
It would, of course, be easier if I could say it wasn’t an insurrection, but it was. The issue isn’t simply that the mob was violent, but who they were violent against and what they were trying to accomplish. I’d likewise seem more evenhanded if I found the fault lay equally on both sides of the aisle.
But it doesn’t.
I’m a limited government Jeffersonian, a Teddy Roosevelt progressive, and the son of a Goldwater conservative. I find many Democratic Party proposals ill-advised, and I don’t doubt that corruption and incompetence taint some individual Democrats. But at this dire moment in what will one day be recorded as American history, the notable crackpots, cowards and scoundrels can all be found on one side of the aisle. And there’s clearly only one party where they’re in charge — the Trumpist Republican Party.
One party sympathetic to the insurrectionists.
One party engaged in overturning the election.
One party complicit in the Jan. 6 attempted coup.
One party willing to overthrow the government in order to cling to power.
One party ducking subpoenas and otherwise obstructing justice.
One party in thrall to a megalomaniac, inflated by delusions of grandeur and twisted by paranoia.
Every day, the evidence of Trumpist guilt and Trump’s own guilt mounts. It’s already convincing. It will soon be overwhelming.
What impartial observer today, on coming upon the shambles of American government and politics in the shadow cast by Donald Trump, would think to laud the United States as “the last best hope of earth”?
And yet, like most of the phantoms hovering with Marley, most of us aren’t strikingly wicked. Most Americans, even as they assault their own democracy, don’t realize what their hardened hearts, misplaced trust, and apathy are one day going to cost them. Some liars run toward news cameras, some liars run away, and too many of my countrymen are deceived by them all.
We are each imperfect human beings. We each harbor memories we wish we didn’t. Many of us already hover unaware among the phantoms.
Throughout Scrooge’s story, we know that Tiny Tim may die.
Here in the real world, we need to come to grips with the fact that we may lose our republic — unless, as Scrooge tells us, the shadows of the future are dispelled.
In his story, Scrooge assures us they will be.
In our story, the end is not yet clear.
We must make it clear.
The day will come when some of us will have to justify why we trusted the untrustworthy.
We will have to explain how someone convinced us to fight for our freedom to not wear a mask, a liberty we don’t have, even as we surrendered the freedom to govern ourselves, a liberty we do have — or did have.
Because if our shadows remain unaltered, if Donald Trump has his way with us, we will have lost our power.
Forever.
And sadder still, our children will have lost theirs.
Offered in hope and with a prayer for our republic, from Poor Elijah and me.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: ‘Hovering With Phantoms’ is Poor Elijah’s Christmas offering.