Dear Santa

Dear Santa:

Let me begin by acknowledging that I am a fully grown man and a Jew, so you are under no obligation to take my Christmas wish list seriously. After all, I am not your regular clientele.

I write to you between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when Christmas shoppers take matters into their own hands regardless of whether they have been naughty or nice. Let me reassure you that I have eschewed all such acts of immediate gratification. I seek nothing material, or for myself alone.

Indeed, the Christmas present I wish for can’t be made by an elf in your toy factory. It is a more cosmic request, something that will require an assiduous application of your Saint Nick powers.

So here goes: Is it in any way possible for you to turn back the clock? Not to daylight savings time, but to an altogether earlier time of our recent past: pre-COVID, before Trump and Twitter, Bitcoin and Biden, the Alt-right and Antifa, crime waves and border crossings, cancellations and vaccinations, conspiracies and selfies.

You would be delivering humankind the most precious gift of all—sanity, the sanctity of life that has somehow been forgotten, and goodwill to our fellow men and women. We have unexpectantly lost those timeless values. Perhaps they never existed at all.

To be fair, our species has never excelled at harmony. But it has all managed to get improbably worse. Our tribal loyalties have never revealed such bitter divisions. Partisanship was never this warlike. The people below the North Pole—your base of operations—especially Americans, are completely polarized. We are desperately in need of some intervention, a spark of “Ho, ho, ho” magic from a jolly Kris Kringle streaking through the sky.

Most of all, we are in need of a reminder of who we once were.

In past years, asking you for a train set would ordinarily suffice. But these are darker times as the winter solstice approaches. Humanity has completely gone off the rails. We’re stuck in our intellectual silos not unlike your occasional problems with chimneys.

Surely you already know what I mean. It’s impossible not to have noticed that our friends, families, and neighbors have changed radically these past several years. We’ve grown intolerant of one another, forever unforgiving, and morally reproaching. We inflate our grievances, overplay the victim card, casually invoking evil to describe those with whom we disagree.

Charges of racism fly impulsively. What were once minor dents in friendships have been elevated to war crimes. Second chances are scarcely offered. No one is above suspicion. Even the old canards about Jews, thought to have been long buried, are suddenly remade as fashionably new. Shouting down has trampled the art of listening into a lost art. Trust is without currency in a world skeptical of cryptocurrency. Being a good neighbor is now a quaint but outdated virtue.

Overall, it’s not a good look for humanity. Arousing the Christmas spirit is going to be tough sledding this year—even for you.

How did we let this happen? Surely life under quarantine did not help. Nor did the misnomer of “social” media. Bunkered and blinkered does not lead to a common understanding, or leave much room for empathy. We have lost the memory of each other’s voices. Even with our N95 masks off, the same people no longer seem as familiar. We somehow filtered them away. Such are the consequences of no longer sharing the same rooms.

We have lost the memory of each other’s voices. Even with our N95 masks off, the same people no longer seem as familiar. We somehow filtered them away.

We had four years of an American presidency dedicated to score-settling and scapegoating. The White House has not set an example for national unity—but here blame lies with the present occupant of the Oval Office, too. Both parties fete fanatics and cast aspersions on their political enemies—whether they be “fake news” organizations; MAGA hat-wearers and anti-vax deniers, “deep-state, blue-state” operatives; Proud Boy insurrectionists and “smash and grab” looters touting BLM permission slips. No one seems to realize that white and Black supremacy are fringe movements with expiration dates that should have long since elapsed.

Instead, our nation has adopted the blood feuds that were once confined to the hills of Eastern Kentucky. The Hatfields and McCoys were replaced by the Coastal Elites and America Firsts—arrogant cosmopolitans versus unwashed deplorables. We are in the grips of a national self-hatred where monuments are defaced and statues beheaded, where race is primal and white skin prima facie evidence of guilt, where jails are deemed too punitive, borders too exclusionary, and debt definitively usurious. And those with private planes admonish the creeping carbon footprints of others. Of course, you know all about that given your impeccable view of melting polar ice caps.

Even Thanksgiving is now upside down. Would it have even been possible to get Indians and Pilgrims to sit down for a meal this last week?

Despite rising prices, stagnant home sales, inflationary gasoline, supply change shortages for everything except fentanyl, we still have much to be thankful for. But we are in no gracious mood to share those feelings. The natives are restless, even though we can’t seem to agree who the natives even are these days. Overall, we Pilgrims have made little progress.

We have become a people incapable of giving thanks. Consumed, instead, with indignant demands for entitlements. Ingratitude is all around us, our manners somewhere lost in the scuffle. You’ll notice what I am mean in the letters you receive this holiday season.

Yet, all those Americans who complain about the evils and imperfections of America would still choose no other country in which to live. All their bellyaching emanates from eating too much on the holiday, and not on account of any systemic shortcomings in the land of the free.

Perhaps this letter is all for naught. I am asking too much. A request that exceeds your powers, encroaching upon the divine. It would amount to a Christmas miracle. The birth of a new savior. A manger scene for the new millennium.

Even a red-nosed reindeer, speed-balling across the horizon, can’t reverse the course of time, or our destiny.

On the other hand, for a man who already knows whether we’ve been bad or good, at least we can count on you to withhold judgment.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.”