Naughty and Nice

At this time of year, I almost always re-post my favorite article: “Wrong Words Day.” The surface theme is what to do when kids in your Singing Time class want to sing the wrong words to the Holiday Songs. The deeper message is how to acknowledge these twin sides of our character and find the proper container for the naughty part so that the nice is more genuinely authentic. 

Every religion, every civilization, every culture, attends to the idea of moral precepts— from the Jewish Ten Commandments to the Christian "Love thy neighbor" to Buddha’s Eightfold Path to Islam’s Five Pillars to the Constitution and beyond, all suggest that we strive towards justice, compassion, charity to foster peace and ethical conduct in the communities where we live. 

 

In actual practice, of course, we fail miserably and have to confess our sins or sit for longer meditation periods or pay back to the community. The culture expects us to admit wrongdoing or with judges and juries, insists that we pay the price when guilt is evident. At every level, the principles of ethical conduct are expected to hold firm and atonement is in order. 

Again, because we are granted with a mind that can be used to propagate good or evil, a heart capable of both love and hate, human desire that can aim for beauty or greed, we’re also capable of astounding hypocrisy—showing up at church for one hour a week and wreaking destructive havoc the other 167 hours. We can rig juries, bribe judges, create laws that hurt the innocents and reward the privileged—you know the story. But even when it’s only lip service, it still agrees that there are moral precepts to at least to pretend to pay service to and some level of expectation that the ratio of nice to naughty is somewhere around 7, 8 or 9 to 1.  Or at least in today’s popular jargon, 6-7!!! :-) 

 

So as you’ll see in the article, we spend some 14 days at Singing Time singing the right words to songs that promise communal festivity, peaceful scenes in a manger, light in the darkness, joyful hora dancing, exuberant sleigh rides and more. And then one day proclaiming that it’s the season to be naughty, a time to decorate with poison ivy, take a ballet class with the Joker, set Barbies and beards on fire. In order for kids to feel the full delicious weight of controlled naughtiness, they have to be firmly established in what it feels like to be nice. It's a 14 to 1 ratio.

 

All of that has changed. When the leader of our country spews an unrelenting flood of verbal garbage 24/7, proclaiming without an ounce of shame an onslaught of abusive, insulting, offensive, malicious, slanderous, vituperative attacks on people who deserve none of it, any one of which would have had any parent washing their kids mouth out with soap, when his fellow party leaders and citizen supporters let it pass without a single critical comment, we are in a new world. Where EVERY DAY is Wrong Words Day and there’s no guilty pleasure in being a little bit naughty because it’s all naughty. 

 

In a festival of mixed metaphor, we can say that the guard rails have been taken off the highway, the lanes obliterated, the stoplights and stop signs torn down, the speed limits no longer posted. Anybody can drive anywhere, any way, any speed, crashing into each other without legal consequence. We can say that the whistleblowers are shrieking without pause so their alarms are now just background noise. The 10 Commandments, every one of which our “leader” has repeatedly broken are now used for toilet paper (in spite of the Louisiana Governor demanding they be posted in every school in the ultimate act of hypocrisy). The levees have been torn down and the floodwaters washing away the last vestiges of human decency. The wild dogs are rampaging through the countryside with no attempt to get them back in their cages and no one allowed to ask “Who let the dogs out?” “Naughty” is now our default setting, our screensaver and our new idea of a criminal is someone who dares to be empathetic, vulnerable, kind, nice. You get the idea.

 

This changes my pleasure in my article. But nevertheless, I persist and will post it following this. In light of all the above, I paraphrase Tiny Tim:

 

“God help us, every one!”