As we hurtle head-long into the vortex of congregation, celebration, and consumption that our culture’s Christmas ritual has become, the following question nags at too many of us, from the backs of our minds:

How can I find a little Christmas peace and happiness, in the midst of all this turmoil?

Nearly a century ago, in a muddy, frigid Belgian valley, a company of men—a few hundred to a thousand— answered that question for themselves, under far more dire circumstances.

“You are standing up to your knees in the slime of a waterlogged trench.  It is the evening of 24 December 1914, and you are on the dreaded Western Front.

“Stooped over, you wade across to the firing step and take over the watch.  Having exchanged pleasantries, your bleary-eyed and mud-spattered colleague shuffles off towards his dugout.  Despite the horrors and the hardships, your morale is high and you believe that in the New Year the nation's army will march towards a glorious victory.

“But, for now, you stamp your feet in a vain attempt to keep warm.  All is quiet when jovial voices call out from both friendly and enemy trenches.  Then the men from both sides start singing carols and songs.  Next come requests not to fire, and soon the unthinkable happens: you start to see the shadowy shapes of soldiers gathering together in no-man's land, laughing, joking, and sharing gifts.

“Many have exchanged cigarettes, the lit ends of which burn brightly in the inky darkness.  Plucking up your courage, you haul yourself up and out of the trench and walk towards the foe...”

British and German officers pictured in No Man's Land on the Western Front early
in World War I, which saw both sides fraternizing on Christmas Day at various
points along the line, observing a spontaneous and self-declared truce.
(Copyright 2011 Robert Hunt Library/Mary Evans)

Thus does Simon Rees introduce his featured 2009 essay on the 1914 Christmas Truce, which occurred between soldiers of the British and German armies manning a stretch of the Front’s line, running from just south of Ypres, Belgium for 27 miles to the La Bassee Canal, near Neuve-Chappelle, France.

Spontaneously, and beyond all convention, it happened. Tannenbaum, lit with small candles, appeared on the German parapets. Rifles were lowered, terms were arranged, and decaying bodies were buried. Gifts of sweets, tobacco, and keepsakes were exchanged, carols were sung, and friendly, “kick-about” football matches were played over a period that varied by location from that one day until well into the New Year. Humanity revealed itself, simply but profoundly. Again, Rees:

“A British Daily Telegraph correspondent wrote that on one part of the line the Germans had managed to slip a chocolate cake into British trenches…accompanied with a message asking for a ceasefire later that evening so they could celebrate the festive season and their Captain's birthday.  They proposed a concert at 7:30 PM, when candles, the British were told, would be placed on the parapets of their trenches. The British accepted the invitation and offered some tobacco as a return present.  That evening, at the stated time, German heads suddenly popped up and started to sing.  Each number ended with a round of applause from both sides. The Germans then asked the British to join in; one very mean-spirited Tommy shouted: 'We'd rather die than sing German.'  To which a German joked aloud: 'It would kill us if you did'.

“Men exchanged gifts and buttons.  In one or two places soldiers who had been barbers in civilian times gave free haircuts.  One German, a juggler and a showman, gave an impromptu and, given the circumstances, somewhat surreal performance of his routine in the centre of no-man's land.

“Captain Sir Edward Hulse of the Scots Guards, in his famous account, remembered… 'Scots and Huns were fraternizing in the most genuine possible manner.  Every sort of souvenir was exchanged, addresses given and received, photos of families shown, etc.  One of our fellows offered a German a cigarette; the German said, "Virginian?"  Our fellow said, "Aye, straight-cut", the German said "No thanks, I only smoke Turkish!"... It gave us all a good laugh.'”

Hulce and other local officers more or less turned a blind eye until their respective higher commanders enforced resumption of hostilities.  Rees concludes:

“In the public's mind the facts have become irrevocably mythologized, and perhaps this is the most important legacy of the Christmas Truce today.  In our age of uncertainty, it’s comforting to believe, regardless of the real reasoning and motives, that soldiers and officers told to hate, loathe and kill, could still lower their guns and extend the hand of goodwill, peace, love and Christmas cheer.”

Fact and fancy aside, can you imagine the personal courage it took, against the possibility of harm, to cross that no-man’s-land unarmed?

What’s the lesson for our holidays—and, possibly, beyond? Take a risk; expose yourself, and reach out.  Maybe:

• Extend our open hands, our willing ears, and our unbound hearts to distant, estranged, or wholly alienated parents; children; siblings; and other loved ones. Leave nothing unsaid.
• Learn from our elders and, as they have in us, delight in our progeny. Don’t just tell them we love them; tell them why.
• Engage, not just with our treasure but also with our time and talents, those outside our cohorts and comfort zones who need help. See, hear, and be with them in their distress; bring them the companion comforts of words and touch.
• Read outside our disciplines, especially in history, literature, and philosophy, to know that long before us others faced worse than what confronts us now. Somehow, they endured and emerged, if not triumphant, wiser.
• Study those least like us to learn how little of transcendent value really separates us.
• Try to understand those with whom we disagree on issues of any kind by listening to, repeating, and respecting their points of view as diligently as our own.
• Claim the rights and freedoms of citizenship, but recognize, value, and place into practice its responsibilities, as well.

It’s worth remembering that we’ve named this season for a man who—whether in life or in legend—embraced the risks of challenging convention and speaking out publicly for love, peace, and social justice, for which he paid with his life. For this, most of us continue to honor him. Today, there are people of every age and description in our streets and parks, risking their safety to question things as they are, bound by a sense that, collectively, we can be and do better.

Can’t the rest of us afford to budge, at least a little? Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with us.

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This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful that young people—in the streets and otherwise—are, openly and with persistence, questioning authority.

Volumes have already been written and uttered by the chattering classes. What are they about? What are they after?

“We, the young people, whom you so rightly fear, say that the society is sick and you and your capitalism are the sickness. You call for order and respect for authority; we call for justice, freedom, and socialism.”

“No longer are the weak to be manipulated by the strong, whose revivifying worth is the property they have amassed. They are now open to scrutiny. It is clear that there is a real and legitimate basis for the seizure and redistribution of property to rechannel it into the service of human needs.”

“The underlying idea of this project is that everyone participating is going to get an opportunity to weigh in and give their opinion…We are attempting to create a new paradigm where decisions are being made from the bottom up.”

These statements were not made at the foot of Wall Street in late October, nor in Berkeley over the weekend. They were made during or after “The Battle of Morningside Heights,” a student-led uprising at ivy-league Columbia University in upper Manhattan, bordering Harlem, in the Spring of 1968. The first quotation is from Mark Rudd, a factional leader of the school’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and the face and personality the media fashioned into its icon, in his Open Letter to President Kirk. The second is taken from the conclusion of Who Rules Columbia? Original Strike Edition, published by strike organizers that September to catalog and document what, to them, it was really about—the distorting effect of money, property, and power on the culture and ideals of both academe and society. The last statement was made by Eleanor Raskin, in A Time to Stir, Paul Cronin’s epic 2008 documentary about that student revolt. She was a Columbia graduate student and SDS member at that time, later joined Weatherman, and is now a law professor who teaches about climate change. (Please forgive my liberty in changing tenses in the latter two—you get the point; plus ça change and all that.)

Against the background of two years of growing radicalism in both the civil rights movement and in on-campus antiwar and anti-draft activity, Morningside Heights was one of many galvanizing events that led to a summer of rage among the young and the racially dispossessed. Three weeks earlier, President Lyndon Baines Johnson—a legislative and political colossus and talisman of hope to citizens of color, now mortally wounded by an intractable foreign war—announced he would not seek a second full term. Six days after that, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who galvanized my generation around the issues of racial and social justice, bled out on a motel balcony in Memphis. Six weeks after the Columbia confrontation, Senator Robert Kennedy’s bid to become the Democratic Party’s “youth candidate” in August, bolstered by his June 4 California Primary victory, ended with his murder in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen. During that convention, the youthful New Left clashed with Mayor Daley the Elder’s police in Chicago’s streets, a stark exercise in theatrical confrontation that deepened and solidified the politics of division. Fear and frustration were everywhere.

Richard Nixon's campaign theme was "restoring law and order" and was entirely reactionary, built on those fears and frustrations—a toxic brew of the war; civil unrest; and white, working class antipathy toward civil rights gains. (No, Virginia, Cheney and Rove didn’t invent those tactics; they merely refined them. Johnson had played both building antiwar sentiment and the nuclear card to perfection against Goldwater four years before.)

I wrote in greater detail two years ago about that Fall’s electoral denouement. Nixon beat Vice President Hubert Humphrey by a half-million votes out of 73 million cast—00.007%. George Wallace, the pro-segregation former Governor of Alabama, actively campaigned in the South and Rust Belt for the American Independent Party. He pulled more than 9 million votes and carried five southern states with 46 electoral votes. Sen. Eugene McCarthy, the write-in "Peace" candidate and the darling of too many in my general cohort who were 21 and who could vote—I couldn’t—didn’t move the needle. (Then and now, I shudder to imagine how many of my peers—particularly those who got involved primarily to score drugs and get laid—no, kids, you didn’t invent that at college, either—indulged in the hubristic "meaningful protest" of writing in "Clean Gene," the Yippies' "Pigasus," or other fanciful creatures. I’m fairly certain J. R. R. Tolkien and Timothy Leary earned goodly shares, too. I salve myself with the realization that they probably didn’t bother to show up.) Combined, these factors provided the Republican a comfortable electoral college margin of 301-91.

Contrary to popular opinion, those choices had consequences; they always do. Unless and until we devise or borrow (European socialism!) a better system that truly takes money out of politics by eliminating the marketing/media profit motive, Presidential elections are by definition a “winner takes all” proposition. One guy wins, one guy loses (sorry, Hillary), often depending on how many votes that season’s Don Quixote—take a bow, Ross, Ralph, and Ron—steals from one or the other. If more people my age had been mature enough to vote for Humphrey, I’m persuaded that, among other things:

• The GOP's vaunted "Southern strategy" would have been wounded, very likely mortally.
• Thirteen kids wouldn’t have been shot by their rifle-toting, draft-dodging classmates in a panic at Kent State University on May, 3 1970.
  The Vietnam war would have ended much sooner—if only because McNamara and Ellsberg would have had a sympathetic, inside audience—sparing our parents and society the burdens of tens of thousands of additional casualties and additional damage to our international reputation.
• There would have been no Watergate and no impeachment proceedings. (In hindsight, one of Nixon’s chiefs of staff pegged Kent State as the event that
  began that Administration’s downward slide into Watergate.)
• The entire realm of public discourse would have been different—at a minimum more progressive (generic meaning, label-makers) than reactionary.

There are obvious parallels in the Morningside Heights/Wall Street metaphors—war; gender, class, and ethnic divides; persistent poverty and economic inequality—but there are key differences. The biggest difference, I think, is that “Occupy Wall/Main Street” is decidedly more proletarian—even though we geezers liked to impress ourselves with the frequent use of the word back in the day. Look closely; despite the media’s efforts to the contrary, they are of every color, sexual orientation, size, and temperament. Unlike most of us were, they are not led by the children of the privileged, sheltered in academia by social position—that is, wealth or skin color, or both—and still blissfully ignorant of the true depths and dimension of the struggles of others. (Go back to A Time to Stir and focus on the divisions in purpose between SDS and Students for African-American Studies—or, for that matter, between males and females in SDS.) These kids have had three generations to know and get used to one another at the most visceral levels; they have a fundamental, common comfort that we never did. Theirs is a strike against the status quo, to be sure, but it’s largely unburdened by those types of xenophobic considerations. Their unifying theme is more purely distilled and what we were searching for: social and economic justice. We used those words but, like Mark Rudd, too many of our leaders congratulated ourselves as a new intellectual and social force, demanding the abandonment of everything with which we disagreed, human or institutional. It was a blinding arrogance that, in retrospect and however well-intentioned, was appalling. OW-MS isn’t printing manifestos so much as asking a simple question:

“You’ve made us a lot of promises and we’ve played by your rules. You’ve got yours, and more. Where’s ours?”

In doing so, they’re speaking for many more of us than they’re being given credit for. What we—former Flower Children and Generation Millenium—have in common are the same worries and doubts, about where we are and where we going. We insisted we spoke truth to power, but we were merely railing against authority. They are pointed at the true source of power today: wealth, as applied to our institutions to serve its acquisition and retention, rather than us.

So, kids: there are among the cotton-tops those of us who are listening, and remember what it’s like to trade personal safety for speaking up. We see beyond efforts to typify you and diminish your message. You’ve already got a stronger grip on what’s at stake than we did, because you’re living now what most of us were merely witnessing in our time. We had education; you have that but, like our Depression and wartime-era parents, you also have the daily confrontation of bitter experience. Let us listen to one another, combine our time and talent, and pursue solutions together.

Don’t do what we did, though. Don’t abandon the possible to pursue the perfect—and allow the Brahmins to steal another election.

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