We are celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, the one who was both god and man.  Ironically, it is during this time that we are made most aware of how far, since His death, all of Western Civilization (and its successfully colonized territories) has sunk from that ideal.  In the name of one who shunned all property and material gain, His followers crowd like livestock into shopping malls and big-box stores, looking for the latest knick-knacks and doo-dads to give to their friends and families.  These mass-produced toys, deprived of any real hunter-gatherer utility or spriritual essence, have become the only legitimate means for conveying what was once known as affection to one another.  And so the once proud human is reduced to a consumer.  Lower in respectability than any animal, plant, or organic life-form of any kind.  But this mass-produced man is told by his mass-produced media that the mass-produced toys under his mass-produced tree are the end of that long historical adventure toward the ultimate peak of progress.  After millennia of searching the depths of our souls and the expanses of the universe, the key to it all was to just let the profits run our lives.  If the market favors french fries over broccoli or game shows over books, we must surrender our control and just let it work its magic.  It may sometimes seem to be absurdly harmful to our interests as human beings, but have faith.  Remember the toys.

So everything is turned to cheap plastic: love, religion, the tools of survival, friendship, work, basically every sacred aspect of life.  That is the paradise that we have created.  Unfortunately, our disillusion and spiritual alienation is not the only cost of this consuming machine.  In the feeding of this beast, death and domination have become the routine for most of the world.  While we sit in our fortress-bubble, wondering if we should have eaten that extra piece of cheesecake, the rest of life on earth is becoming unbearably hellish.  Wars carried out in the name of our kind of obese-eat-the-poor “freedom;” the unrestrained poisoning and destruction of the natural resources that are needed to sustain life; the hegemonic cultural genocide creating a new world order of slaves and consumers, none living more fulfilling lives than the others.  All of this can only seem desireable from the perspective of one of the comfortably numb cogs in the machine.  Like Short Round in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom curing Indy with a torch to the back, we must never relent in waking as many as we can to the apocalyptic seeds which they sow.