Do You Know It's Christmas Every Day?

My first official maudlin for the season.

Radio playing "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

And I'm crying like a baby.

The words running through my mind as the tears run down my face and my moustache gets all messy: Do they know?

Do the artists understand?

Do the fans?

Do you know it's Christ-time every day?

I'm not knocking art for charity efforts. They have their place and use, definitely better than turning a collective back on people in need -- and much, much better than wheeling in the machines of war against the supposedly evil enemy of the day.

But we should all be making it Christmas every day for the people around us -- not necessarily giving what's easy to give, but reaching out, giving our time, finding what they need, and helping them.

If we were busy helping each other, we wouldn't have time to argue whether Trump is a worse president than Obama or Bush.

If the Ethiopians were busy helping each other, they wouldn't have time to argue about abstract principles of capital.

If Bill Gates were busy (really) helping people, he wouldn't have time to implement yet more "new" strategies to keep shoring up that ageing (non-)OS and office (non-)productivity suite in the market, and other solutions could rightfully compete.

If I were busy really helping people, I wouldn't have time to post useless webrants.

We wouldn't have time to try to put people in jail because their life has been so cruel they seem to need drugs.

We wouldn't have time to give people in struggling countries more reason to hate these who seem to them to have no problems.

We wouldn't have time to waste valuable resources capturing markets and money streams and putting weaker competitors out of business. We wouldn't have time to convince ourselves someone else is weaker, or to convince ourselves that the supposedly weaker has no place.

So much of what is wrong in the world is caused by people who have too much time on their hands -- simply because they refuse to see that it's Christmas every day. They refuse to reach out and help.

They, no, we refuse to remember the spirit of giving, the spirit of Christmas every day.