Gifts

As I tried to avoid aggressive shopping carts yesterday at my local shopping center, I mused on the futility of the stressed shopping around me. Frowns and quizzical stares at various items marked many faces. Others, whose clothing and demeanor belied challenged finances, seemed close to tears at they looked at price tags.

 

The materialism of Christmas is one the world's greatest propaganda victories. It is wrapped in a thin foil of generosity and good will. Its reality is profits for retailers at the expense of quality of life for shoppers.

 

Home Depot provided me with a glaring example when I recently shopped for needed masonry supplies. I had to move half dozen dead conifers from in front of a shelf unit in the garden center in order to find the pavers I needed for my project. Dead conifers over six feet tall wrapped in plastic netting. I looked around and saw scores of similar dead trees stacked everywhere. These trees no longer helped us deal with climate change. They are likely to become part of the problem in the future if burned as trash or pellets for wood stoves.

 

The scarf or pair of socks as seasonal gift may indeed suit a practical need for an appreciative recipient. But the carriages full of hideous plastic toys I witnessed at Target are a ridiculous waste of time, money and natural resources. I was reminded of the many listings I visited when looking to buy a house. These houses were littered with plastic toys to the point of safety hazard. I thought, "What are these people trying to compensate for by distracting their children with all this junk?'

 

Generosity is different from tokenism. Any minority member will explain this to you. Generosity is a daily quality of personal practice or personal habit. Tokenism is the provision of some specific object/act as a symbol of generosity or reciprocity. Gifts are simply tokens. They do not prove anything. They are not evidence of real generosity. At best, they represent an aspiration to generosity.

 

Actual generosity is a communication, a relationship, a commitment. Too few moderns have the stomach for it apparently. The increasing wave of Libertarian thought among the more affluent supports this hypothesis. The push to privatize civic responsibility from collecting trash to providing mental health services is evidence of the power of money over the generosity of the citizenry with its time for civic oversight and willingness to pay taxes for the quality of general society. A gift plaque for a park bench simply is no substitute for an engaged citizenry which invests in its community on a regular basis.

 

A basic pillar of what I call humanism is generosity, as practiced in daily life. It has little to do with money. It requires no tokenism. It is as much a gift, in the sense of a benefit, to me as I hope it is to those with whom I live my daily life.