To all the folks who've spent the better part of the last six years delighting in any and every misstep, miscalculation or error made by our duly elected president;
to the conscience-challenged political strategists/hacks who've toiled endlessly to tease tragedies into scandals;
to those who've spent millions of dollars influencing politicians to act in overtly partisan ways, benefiting corporate interests and ignoring the will of the voters;
to the neo-Confederates and wacko secessionists;
to the disaster capitalists who profit from chaos;
to the demonizers of community outreach;
to the corporate-owned media who have labored mightily to craft a fictional world where so-called liberal interests conspire to control the dissemination of news, where Christianity is under perpetual attack, where the devious poor rip-off the deserving rich, where the right to vote is purposefully obstructed, where extreme points of view taint intelligent moderate discourse, where science is jettisoned in favor of superstition, where fear trumps hope;
to the war mongers and gun fetishists;
to all the outright liars, craven data manipulators, avaricious CEOs amassing fortunes upon the backs of underpaid workers all the while insisting they are self made;
to all the sad racists, misogynists, agists, and homophobes;
to all the bullies who sublimate their own inadequacies by abusing the meek;
to all those too terrified of their own mortality to practice humility, charity, compassion, curiosity, open-mindedness;
to all those battered and betrayed by their past who are too distracted to remember that we all breathe the same air, that we are all born and we all die, that we should strive to leave the planet in better condition than when we lived upon it, that it is always better to embrace rather than to antagonize, that love is always always always the answer;
to those people who will read this and sneer;
to those people and everyone else: happy holidays. And a merry Christmas. And a happy new year. And all other good stuff that money can never buy.