The sad beings who put a sign read­ing “San­ta Is Fake” in a win­dow along a Christ­mas parade route, and West­ern nations who’ve made unprece­dent­ed cuts to aid bud­gets have some­thing in com­mon: nei­ther see the val­ue in what they are denigrating.

The anti-San­ta pet­ti­ness (in, I’m sad to say, my home­town of Brant­ford, Ontario) prompt­ed enough upset calls that the police put out a state­ment that said in part: “While it isn’t ille­gal to be a ‘Grinch’, we do encour­age every­one to embrace the spir­it of the season…”
Dis­lik­ing and dis­parag­ing the ram­pant “Christ­mas spir­it” com­mer­cial­ism that pre­dom­i­nates from Sep­tem­ber onwards is com­plete­ly understandable.
Deem­ing it nec­es­sary, or use­ful, to deny chil­dren that brief peri­od in life  when they can frol­ic in inno­cent antic­i­pa­tion and the joy of it being ful­filled, how­ev­er, makes no sense.
Kids don’t need adults to tell them there isn’t real­ly an over­weight beard­ed man in a sleigh pulled by fly­ing crea­tures who lands with a giant sack of toys on the roof of every house in the world in one night. They work it out on their own, which ought to come as no sur­prise to any par­ent who rais­es one to the point of literacy.
And any­way, the dis­ap­point­ment of the rev­e­la­tion is short-lived, and a sub­tle les­son that will help them cope as the harsh­er aspects of life — ill­ness, fail­ures big and small, eco­nom­ic chal­lenges and even­tu­al­ly, the prospects of mor­tal­i­ty — become their reality.

                    ON A MORE BRUTAL SCALE

Mean­while per­haps, or more like­ly because they live in places where the Christ­mas spir­it doesn’t have great com­mer­cial or soci­etal appeal, by the time it is over with this year, child mor­tal­i­ty will have increased world­wide for the first time this century.
Accord­ing to the Gates Foundation’s annu­al Goal­keep­ers report, the num­ber of chil­dren dying before their fifth birth­day is pro­ject­ed to increase to 4.8 mil­lion, up 200,000 since 2024.
The blame for that lies square­ly at the feet of the world’s major devel­oped coun­tries, whose lead­ers’ equiv­a­lent of Santa’s bag of presents is  aid for devel­op­ing coun­tries, which has plunged 27 per­cent. Slash­ing what for most West­ern nations amounts to a tiny per­cent­age of over­all spend­ing, will have a seri­ous neg­a­tive effect on  progress against killer dis­eases includ­ing HIV, malar­ia, and polio.
Oxfam Amer­i­ca esti­mat­ed that the shut­down of USAID  alone threat­ens 23 mil­lion children’s access to edu­ca­tion , and means up to 95 mil­lion peo­ple face los­ing basic health­care, “poten­tial­ly lead­ing to more than 3 mil­lion pre­ventable deaths per year.”
On a polit­i­cal lev­el that’s blind mis­use of what’s known as “soft power”.
Defined as “a per­sua­sive approach to inter­na­tion­al rela­tions, typ­i­cal­ly involv­ing the use of eco­nom­ic or cul­tur­al influ­ence”, it’s how to make friends instead of enemies.
Forty years ago this week, the British super­group Band Aid released “Do They Know It’s Christ­mas” to raise mon­ey for Ethiopi­an famine victims.
The hor­rors of the famine were well report­ed, and hence the response to the song, and the appeal, was massive.
If a sim­i­lar effort was made to sup­port Sudan, which the UN and aid agen­cies agree is the great­est human­i­tar­i­an dis­as­ter in the world today, and per­haps ever in mod­ern times, one doubts it would be any­where near as successful.
The rea­son for that goes beyond the tired but some­what under­stand­able excuse of “donor fatigue”.
It’s because unlike Ethiopia, the for­eign Press can’t get in.
TV in par­tic­u­lar, has a unique abil­i­ty to make suf­fer­ing graph­ic and real, to fol­low the dic­tum of  one of my first news edi­tors: “If you can find a heart string, pluck it.”
It’s the key to open­ing purse strings.
The killing and destruc­tion in Gaza is doc­u­ment­ed only because there are brave local jour­nal­ists who, with­out the lux­u­ry of time, suf­fi­cient resources and back-up, strive dai­ly try to tell the sto­ry even as they live it.
And even when human-made dis­as­ters like Sudan and Gaza are acces­si­ble to the cam­eras, the reports now car­ry the pro for­ma warn­ing:  “View­ers may find some images disturbing.”.
As some­one who spent a con­sid­er­able chunk of a work­ing career expos­ing those kinds of images, I can’t shout it loud enough: “Of course they’re dis­turb­ing, If they weren’t, there’d be no rea­son to show them.”

TV out­lets whose own­ers and edi­tors think oth­er­wise when report­ing the human con­di­tion, should con­sid­er chang­ing their logos to the three mon­keys gif.
Because if you nei­ther see, hear nor peak of evil ‚then evil is what you get.
And any­one who sees that as in any way accept­able, is prob­a­bly the kind of per­son who thinks kids need to be told San­ta isn’t real.
Com­ments are wel­comed. Click CONTACT on the site header.
To receive e‑mail alerts to new posts, Click SIGN-UP on the header.