This year my family decided to congregate at my brother's.  To set the scene imagine a man near forty who has elected to do everything in his power to become white trash.  Unlike others who attain that dubious title through generations of inbreeding and almost super human incompetence, my brother aspired to be the lowest rung on the human ladder.  Following a map of redneck stereotypes he adorns his home in the latest trailer park chic.  From a smattering of broken toys across the front lawn to a rusted out Firebird in the driveway, his home is proof that all although some aspirations, dare I say dreams can come true that doesn't mean they all should.

Waking up the front steps I say hello to David Whence, a mycologist from San Francisco.  David shows up two or three times a year to study the remains of couches moldering on my brother's front porch.  A straight decade of untold sofas left to decompose in the elements -- all so my brother can sit on the front porch in his underwear drinking beer, to which I say god bless but fuck-all at least clear off the mold-melted couch corpses instead of just piling new alley acquired ass pads; David is studying a new breed of mushroom growing in the couch compost.  David says hello without a glance.  He seems fascinated by the way the mushrooms sway as if following his movements like the eyes of Jesus. 

My parents and I are the last to arrive.  The rest of the family is already present, not to mention pissed which I mean in the English sense.  I won't lie.  I may have had a few road beers on the drive over, but that was only to take the edge off Pops' backseat driving, and Mom's insistence there are octopi in the sky.  I keep my disgust at the relatives reckless consumption suppressed.  This is Giftmas after all, not a time for one's true feelings to come out.  Happy day, happy day.  No reason to complain, even though Cousin Louis is here, and the motherfucker knows I told him I'd break his face if I ever saw him again, but it's Giftmas!  Forget the fact he owes me ten thousand dollars -- that pawn store robbery was my fucking idea, and he has the balls to shoot me in the leg then make off with the cash... breathe, just breathe.  Revel in Uncle George's annual solicitation: 

"Well, now that we're all here... finally, we can get down to the business at hand.  My wife, Elizabeth, the light of my life, my only reason for existence, was recently kidnapped by the Yakuza.  Now I know I say that every Christmas, but the poor woman is a plagued by bad luck." 

"No kidding.  Look who she married," Pops says to me, though I'm pretty sure he's aware the whole room heard him.  But Uncle George doesn't miss a beat. 

"Fuck you Larry.  Elizabeth is in trouble.  So I'm asking if you will all contribute to her ransom." 

Then on cue, out comes his little burlap sack that I swear to everything I hold holy, may I forever lose the ability to get intoxicated if I'm lying, there is a fucking dollar sign on the side of the bag.  It's like having your fingers crossed when making a promise you know you'll break; the one bit of honesty about the man's begging.  However, it should be noted there is a possibility Uncle George donned a distinctly racist disguise then kidnapped his wife in order to lend some validity to the notion she was kidnapped by the Japanese mafia... every year for 15 years. 

But now is not the time for cynicism, so we all put a few dollars in the bag.  My brother's current wife -- number four I think --  directs us to the dining room.  We assemble around three folding tables lined end to end.  While she brings seven extra large pizzas, purchased the night before and heated in the oven earlier, my brother says to me that this is going to be a long winter.  I make the mistake of asking him to elaborate.  As soon as he mentions the Jews I zone out.  Conspiracy theories about Zionist weather manipulation don't exactly sit well with me.  Mom insists we draw the curtains so the octopi in the sky don't spy on us, and I oblige her, if only to get away from my brother. 

The cousins huddle at one end of the improvised dining table.  Tim is wearing a shirt made of fuse wire, and giggling as he plays with a lighter.  Cousin Myra picks her nose like she's digging for the reset button on her life.  Will keeps phasing out of reality thanks to his extreme ADD; his molecules vibrate into another reality ever so often, and he always looks disappointed when he flickers back to here and now.  

Mom chews on a slice of pineapple and giardiniera.  Uncle Jordan asks her how things've been.  She smiles, and tells him, "I saw you die in a dream last night.  You didn't enjoy it.  Dying.  It was a real mess, and you know your wife can't clean for shit." 

Uncle Jordan glances at me, and I give him the finger.  I can see the blood welling up in his eye, and if history is any indication, when he gets pissed enough that blood will come shooting out.  We just have to keep pushing him. 

My brother's kids don't eat with us.  Instead they run back and forth serving drinks.  It's a constant stream of icy fresh beers, soda, and booze.  I can't help wondering if it's like this year round:  the kids waiting on the adults then left to fight over whatever scraps remain.  It might explain why my brother and his wife are a collective six hundred pounds while their children are thinner than twigs.   

After dinner the family shuffles into the living room, a mess of ripped thrift store furniture flanked by the world's latest and most expensive entertainment system.  Presents get passed around.  I've often suggested we should do the gifts before we start drinking, but no one's ever gone with me on this.  I recommend it because, as usual, everybody gets at least one present that elicits the response, "What the fuck made you think I'd want this?"   

To which Pops responds, "Because the sales chick said it was specifically designed for cunts." 

Nothing scars a Giftmas into memory like two middle aged men -- my Pops and Uncle George -- throwing haymakers at one another over a meat thermometer; or witnessing my Aunt Beam explain that she gave Myra, her daughter, perfume because the girl smells, not bad, but strange.  As the generosity of the season evolves from presents to punches and screams, I step outside with a glass of bourbon.  Lighting a cigarette I blow a cloud into the sky, and am surprised to see an octopus the size of a VW Bug swimming through the air.  Truth is always stranger than fiction, but nothing is stranger than family. 

I say that because the evening ends with everyone hugging and kissing and saying farewell as if we all can't wait to do this again.  And the truth is, we can't.  Despite the homemade stitches, the black eyes, and the reckless gypsy curses, there's love.

The Sun is, for the most part, green.  Technically, yellow is correct because that's the only color people see.  The Earth's atmosphere filters out higher spectrum colors leaving us with the familiar glow.  However, the truth is that our Sun is a blaze of boiling green.  (Well, even more technically correct is in space the Sun burns white, but science, science, science and so forth.) 

"But what about Sciencey shows?  They throw up yellow pictures of the Sun all the time."

Simple.  Cosmologists sometimes change the color of Sun photos so the general public will recognize the image.  Consider that if someone showed you a picture of a green sun your first reaction wouldn't be, "Hey that's ours."  So instead of having to devote a few minutes to going over things like the color spectrum, and atmospheric light filtration TV cosmologists simply digitally alter the Sun to familiar shades.  Then they can get to more important things like how the Sun is planning to kill us all in a few million years.

In the end, people have a perception of the world that isn't wholly true.  As a result everyone "knows" the color of the Sun without actually knowing a damn thing about it; reality is a series of perceptions rather than facts.

Take John Dryden.  He lived during the 1600s during what is known as Restoration England. 

Dryden so dominated the literary landscape at that time he felt safe taking a huge shit on what he considered lesser writers like Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare; and one of the things he criticized them for was using a preposition at the end of sentence.  Now, the pretentious out there will say, "Of course he did, and he was right.  No one is supposed to end a sentence with a preposition."  Which would be fine except there is no actual rule, or obligation under pain of hand amputation not to use a terminal preposition.  The whole concept that such a thing is wrong comes, primarily, from John Dryden not liking sentences ending in such a fashion.  It was just something he refused to put up with.

One man bitched enough to create what is essentially an urban legend of grammatical correctness.  And in a way, this is a good thing because it shows that one person can change the world.  So it doesn't take much to alter reality.  The question then is how far to take things.

Nobody wants to think of the Nazis as having any sense of decency, but apparently, even they had their limits.  Enter Oskar Dirlewanger.  Historians have described him as "a psychotic killer and child molester," "violently sadistic," and more than likely a necrophiliac.  So it makes perfect sense he was put in charge of an entire brigade... especially since every soldier in it came from either a prison or a lunatic asylum.  Imagine a military unit composed of several thousand convicted serial killers, mafia hitmen, and all around violent sociopaths.  The Dirlewanger Brigade was a nightmare tornado of rape, torture, baby bayoneting, and gruesome murder; it is estimated that in one day this one brigade murdered almost 35,000 people.  Answerable only to Hitler's second in command, Heinrich Himmler, the Dirlewanger Brigade was given free rein to act in whatever manner it wished.  As result, they committed atrocities so horrendous that a Nazis judge attempted to have them brought up on war crimes charges. 

That bears repeating.

A Nazis judge found the actions of the Dirlewanger Brigade so atrocious he wanted to prosecute them for war crimes.  And in a sense he wasn't alone.  One SS officer described the brigade as "more a group of pigs than soldiers."  General Heinz Guderian wrote to Hitler asking that the brigade be sent to the Eastern Front, a veritable death sentence at the time.  Himmler himself often sent orders that local police and troops be on the ready because when the brigade got going they sometimes became so frenzied they killed anything that moved, including other German troops. 

In essence, even Nazis didn't want to be associated with the Dirlewanger Brigade.  And that means there is a point in everyone where human decency kicks in.  There is only so much misery a person can witness or be a cause of before feeling the need to act.  Unfortunately, not everyone has that much faith in humanity which brings us to Mother Teresa. 

Many know her as the sarcastic taunt most likely to occur when someone tries to do something decent for no apparent reason -- "Way to go Mother Teresa."  But this verbal abuse is actually based on a real person.  Mother Teresa is regarded by thousands as a true saint.  Due to her charity work in the more hellish parts of Indian, she is considered by some as proof of how religion can motive people to great acts of kindness.  However, the more appropriate sentiment might be how religion continues to manipulate people into doing something they might not otherwise do. 

See, in the later part of her life Mother Teresa began harboring serious doubts about the existence of god.  She wrote to close friends expressing concerns such as, "Where is my faith?  Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness... If there be God — please forgive me."  She also wrote, "What do I labor for?  If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true."

In the closing decade of her life Mother Teresa didn't believe in god yet used her saintly status to keep raking in the cash.  It sounds harmless -- the money went to charity -- except she kept promoting her cause as a religious one.  See, religion doesn't simply offer the notion that helping others is an act of decency, it says charity is rewarded in the afterlife.  Every kind act is to be regarded as a point one can exchange later for admission through the pearly gates.  The more points one has the easier it is to get in.  That Mother Teresa kept, in essence, utilizing this spiritual bribery to elicit donations suggests she didn't trust humanity to be charitable without some motivating factor.  Although it is true millions are donated to various charities every year, each donation is the result of some type of catalyst:  a super typhoon destroys a country, the right celebrity begs for cash, a loved one dies of or suffers from a particular disease, sitting through the whole sad critter commercial.  People give when and where they think it is needed most.

So what does all this have to do with one another?

Based on how people see the world they react accordingly.  Yet, how a person views the world is always limited.  Those limitations inspire the way in which an individual responds to circumstances, often leading to fatalistic disillusionments such as, "But I'm just one person," regardless of how much one person can in fact affect the world.  However, regardless of disillusionment or apathy, from time to time there are events so extreme they force people to act.  What motivates a person is irrelevant given that at our core there is something which compels us to stop accepting the various levels of prevalent tragedy.  So, in the end, people will do the right thing when they think it's the right time, but the so-called right time is like the color of the Sun -- you only think you know what's best.

My point being don't be cynical about charity.  Just because the makers of the Fast and the Furious 6 have now tied the release of that film's DVD to a charity in memorial of recently deceased actor Paul Walker isn't a shameless ploy to increase sales.  It has the genuine intent of helping people.  So go out this Tuesday and buy it.  You might inadvertently help save someone's life.

SOURCE MATERIAL:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/first-light.html

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap070624.html

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/ending-sentences-with-prepositions

http://www.merriam-webster.com/video/0025-preposition.htm

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/5171773/Notorious-SS-unit-traced.html 

http://www.factualworld.com/article/Oskar_Dirlewanger

Steven J. Zaloga, The Polish Army 1939–45, page 25 

Richard Rhodes Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust

J Bowyer Bell Besieged: Seven Cities Under Siege, page 190

Bryan Mark Rigg Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military, page 334 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/letters-reveal-mother-teresas-secret/ 

http://popwatch.ew.com/2013/12/03/fast-furious-dvd-sales-benefit-charity/