I recently viewed a photograph of a young soldier from Maryland, John Kreiner, who was killed in France during World War II. He was Hollywood handsome, with one of those smiles that radiated nothing but future. The image set me off. I almost couldn’t speak for a moment.
That’s how it goes when I see photographs of people who died young — Anne Frank, for instance; the first graders of Sandy Hook; Peter Moskos, the Marine corporal from my hometown who was killed in Vietnam; boys and young men, casualties of Baltimore street violence, their faces printed on T-shirts; high school classmates who departed in their 20s and 30s from drug overdoses, AIDS and cancer.
I know: People die. I lost my younger brother two years ago this week, and a brother-in-law and mother-in-law within the next year. It’s hard to accept, death being part of life. But hardest of all is accepting lives lost in the bright light of youth. Those deaths are the most disturbing, and those who died senselessly and violently — on city streets or in foreign wars — the worst of these.
Here we are, on the eve of Christmas 2023, and the greeting cards say, “Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Man,” but does anyone feel that?
I suppose you could challenge the concept any year, but this year the cannons roar from three sides at once, and it’s essentially the same roar heard eight centuries ago.
I hope you don’t mind some less-than-glittery tidings on Christmas Eve. There’s good cheer and eggnog waiting on the other side of this essay. But I need to push through the winter briars.
I remain hopelessly stuck on the idea of progress or, more precisely, the promise of progress. It might seem foolish, but somewhere in the 20th century I came to believe in the promise that, starting with the developed nations of North America and Europe, there would be steady human advancement away from ignorance, poverty, bigotry and violence.
And yet, here we are, approaching the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, and human beings still wage brutal wars or suffer from them.
More than 50,000 Russians, many of them young men, have died trying to take Ukraine for their dictator in Moscow. Some 1,200 miles away, Hamas carries out a terrorist attack in Israel; Israel then battles against Hamas in Gaza, with thousands of civilians among the casualties.
Whatever political rationale or moral imperative the makers of war argue, their legacy is written in gravestones: A new generation becomes scarred with the trauma of war, burdened with hatred for their enemies and instructed that violence is not a last resort but a first-stage solution.
And on and on. It’s an appalling thing to teach our young.
In this country, millions of my fellow Americans embrace conspiracy theories, reject science and ridicule progressivism even as it enhances the quality of their lives. Hate crimes, and antisemitism specifically, surge; immigrants are scorned as “poisoning the blood of our country” by a former president and wannabe dictator. The nation continues to suffer from gun violence and mass shootings.
I am not the first to wander into despondency on Christmas Eve. Others have gazed upon the burning wreckage of humanity and scoffed at “peace on Earth.” In 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “Christmas Bells,” a Civil War poem. His wife had died and his eldest son had been wounded fighting for the Union.
Wrote Longfellow: “And in despair I bowed my head, ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said; For hate is strong, And mocks the song, Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Longfellow ultimately expressed faith that God was not dead and that, “The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
Of course, he had to express optimism. What’s the alternative?
Despondency is not a word you hear in the lyrics of Christmas songs, and for good reason: On this one night and one day, we all get to be hopeful. We all get to step out of the trenches, wave a white flag and raise a glass to “peace on Earth” even if it does not seem to be of this Earth.
The man who reminded me of the Longfellow poem did the same. “As it has been for thousands of years, the world is full of hate and selfishness and egos,” he wrote. “Young people can save every generation.”
We keep hoping that’s true. We keep hoping the next generation will be the Next Greatest Generation, fixing what we’ve left broken, rejecting ignorance and bigotry, rejecting guns and violence, rejecting the wannabe dictator, being champions of justice and peace, saving the planet, embracing progress in all things.
But young people need to be encouraged, especially because so many seem to be discouraged, unable to generate those smiles that radiate nothing but future. They look around and see a world on fire and too many grownups behaving like half-adults.
I don’t know what else to suggest. You can make tax-deductible donations. You can bake cookies for neighbors. You can call an old friend who’s home alone. All good.
But encouraging a young man or woman as they come of age in the 21st Century, trying to finally break free of the destructive problems of the past, might be the best gift of all.
