In This Bleak Midwinter

 

January is invariably a bleak month. Although the hours of daylight are beginning to increase slightly, that daytime sky is as often as not overcast. In any case, the operative contrast is a stark one between the festive lights of the Christmas season and the empty dark spaces where the Christmas Trees and other holiday lights so recently were. Personally, I always feel a certain sadness the day the Christmas Tree goes out in the trash (photo), and I suspect many others experience similar post-Christmas sadness.

In 2026, however, this midwinter bleakness is exacerbated not by nature and the season, but by what we are sadly experiencing socially and politically in this unprecedented time of troubles, brought about by the widespread breakdown of democratic aspirations.

Here in New York City, we can watch (and hear) nurses picketing some New York hospitals in a very timely challenge to the profit-making mentality that dominates the American medical system. Before his election, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who joined the nurses on their picket line on the first day of the strike, had said that the city “needs to reconsider its relationship to wealthy private hospital systems.” Indeed, as the expiration fo the ACA subsidies and Washington's inability to restore them has revealed, it may be -  may be already past - time for all Americans to reconsider our relationship to a health-care system which makes some rich, while leaving the rest poor and barely cared for.

But the situational center of our nation right now is not New York, let alone Washington, but Minneapolis. Few things highlight the moral depths to which our country has descended more starkly than the recent slaughter of Renee Good in her car on a Minneapolis street. As if attacks on law-abiding immigrants and refugees on their way to work or school or church were not bad enough, ordinary American citizens are now themselves being targeted, attacked, and killed.

Compared to that, intellectual abominations like the censoring of Plato's Symposium in a Texas school may seem small matters. But, in fact, such scandalous policies confirm Socrates' significant insight - illustrated in his own experience of trial and execution - that dedication to wisdom, truth, morality must inevitably put one at odds with a decadent demagogic polity.

More immediately terrifying in practice than the censoring of Plato is the threat (whether real or propaganda bluster remains yet to be seen) to attack Greenland, an act of unjustified war against a NATO ally (the kingdom of Denmark), which could well herald the untimely death of that once great alliance. Undoubtedly, American troops could march from their base into Nuuk, Greenland's capital, and raise the American flag, fully expecting to get away with such an act of wanton aggression. But the cost will be real in killing an 80-year effort to minimize war in world affairs, and it will leave the U.S. friendless in an increasingly unfriendly world.

In her famous Christmas poem, In the Bleak Midwinter, Christina Rossetti contemplated the contrast between our bleak and limited existence and the gift given us in the Incarnation with its possibility for human transformation by grace - the one and only true alternative to the false pseudo-Christian religion of power, domination, and control, currently being preached by our leaders.