Will the year be new?

From
Havana                                                                              Read Spanish Version

Will
the year
be new?

By
Manuel Alberto Ramy
maprogre@gmail.com

This
is our last issue of 2007. The final month of the year has two
important dates –December 25, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve, which
a second after twelve o’clock signals the beginning of another
year. Will it be new? What is new? The answer lies in the symbolism
of the Christmas birth. And valid for all, whether you are believers
of any religion, or only believe in human beings in their material
finiteness, or in going down in history.

For
some it is faith, for others the story of an exceptional man, and
still for others a beautiful legend. But the life of Jesus –Jeshua–
is the life of a preacher with simple, elemental but powerful values:
kindness, justice, solidarity, loving others as yourself. Shall I go
on? Hardly necessary. The counter values crush us every day of our
lives as well as the history of societies.

Values,
that is the point, and it is difficult to be coherent with them: that
our lives follow humane standards and that societies, when using
their instruments do not lose the goal of those values, that they
answer to them, to its truly human dimension.

Unfortunately
a large part of the world that claims to celebrate Christmas has lost
the Jeshua of the parables and the miracles, among them the one
dedicated to share the fish and the bread among all. He is not in the
stores: he has been substituted by Spiderman gifts, jewels, money and
so many things, thanks to the magicians of business. Is an
explanation necessary? Actually, yes. Jesus, reality or myth, is the
anti-business; stripped of its essence he is only a rag doll from a
banal and sweetened up fairy tale, and also a catch in the
advertising that deluge TV screens during the holiday season. The
tree is better than the manger, the alternative crib of his birth.
And the manger in the stable can be equaled to a favela. By the way,
great portions of the world are favelas; whole countries are fabelas.
Perhaps from those regions the alternative values capable of making
us more human will crop up, together with a political project in
which the “illogic” of caring for others is the standard
governing the economy. That the delicate road of harmonizing what is
for all is not lost with what is for each, and vice versa.

I
don’t want to be a spoilsport. At home, like most of you, I’ll
dine with my family; I’ll remember those not present –the living
and the dead. I’ll toast everyone, exclude no one, so that we can
tune our lives and our societies to essential values, and I’ll
remember that the Jesus of 2,000 years ago only wrote once in his
life. He did it with a stick on the dust and erased it. What did he
write? I think it must have been a parable: all words are erasable;
only deeds are permanent and open up roads.

Season’s
greetings to all.

Manuel
Alberto Ramy is the Havana correspondent of Radio Progreso
Alternativa and the Spanish edition editor of Progreso
Semanal/Weekly.