Video posted to YouTube by jakejake5506.

Imagine there’s no countries 

It isn’t hard to do 

Nothing to kill or die for 

Imagine, John Lennon

And no religion too 

Imagine all the people 

Living life in peace… 

Over Thanksgiving weekend we watched the massacre in Mumbai, an intollerable and targeted attack by Islamic-radicals against the peaceful Jews of Chabad House, wealthy Westerners, and Indians including non-Wahhabi Moslems. As the massacre and its ramifications continued to play out on Black Friday, we Americans were perpetrating our own uniquely cruel, unconscionable and unconscious violence: the killing of Jdimytai Damour, a temporary worker at a Wal-Mart in New Jersey.  No pretense of noble religious or political intentions here. A young man, thirty-four years old, I believe, run down by a stampede of shoppers. Suffocated. His windpipe was crushed, while he tried to do his job and also attempted to protect a pregnant young woman.

As I think about the juxtaposition of the Mumabi Massacre and the death of Mr. Damour, I remember when actress Audrey Hepburn, working as Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said  ”I do not believe in collective guilt, but I do believe in collective responsibility.”  I have long agreed with that sentiment, but I think perhaps I no longer do. I think I believe in both collective guilt and collective responsibility. We as the terrorist and the shopper are demonstrating a disconcertingly universal callousness that seems to me to be all of a piece. When we engage in the crass accumulation of things in such a way and at such a time, when others are being tortured and killed virtually before our eyes, we are no better than the terrorists. We too are just as unconscious, just as rudimentary, and just as disrespectful of life.

Call me a dreamer or an idealist, but I think the underlying message of Christmas – religious or secular – is not about frenzied Black Friday shopping for the best deal on holiday presents. I like to think it’s about honest value,  a call to honor real needs, not contrived needs. It is a call to bow before the sacredness of all life and to lay our gifts – however modest they be be – at the feet of the Ineffable that resides in all human beings. 

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world…

Imagine, John Lennon

Today, December 8, 2008, is the 28th anniversary of John Lennon’s death.