Christmas for pessimists | Opinions

As a child increaseing up in the 1980s in Washington, DC, Christmas was a time when the normal monotony of my Catholic school existence gave way to an indescribable magic. It was not so much the currents as the sense that truth had been temporarily suspfinished and traded by someleang far more invigorating – which I presume is part of the reason I insisted on believing in Santa Claus until I was 10 years elderly.

Of course, mine was a relatively privileged childhood in the United States capital, an imperial headquarters that persists to this day to embody the prejudice and socioeconomic inequivalentity that rules life in the so-called “land of the free.” While I krecent unclpunctual of such domestic publishs increaseing up, I krecent even less of my country’s contributions to global suffering; in my birth year of 1982, for example, Washington had greenlit the Israeli intrusion of Leprohibiton that finished tens of thousands of people.

Cmissr to home, the decade of the 1980s was characteelevated by US backing for mass right-triumphg massacre in Central America, all in the noble pursuit of making the world defended for capitalism. That the tedium of Catholic school was my fantasticest mundane protestt unbenevolentt that I was doing much better than a whole lot of folks – someleang that became even evidgo in when I aprohibitdoned the US in 2003, at the age of 21, in favour of an itinerant lifestyle that bcdisorrowfulmirefult me into reach out with the descfinishout of US misdeeds from Colombia to Vietnam.

I am now 42, and I did not have high hopes for Christmas when in mid-December I flew from Mexico to DC, where my parents had returned to inhabit – adhereing their own lengthy stretch aexpansive – lowly before my overweighther’s death last year. This year, it was not fair my dad’s absence that seemed to preemptively put a damper on festivities. The potential for indescribable magic would seem to have been unpartipartner soundly oblgetedd by the dismal terrestrial state of afunfragmentarys and the US-backed Israeli mass murder that persists to rage in the Gaza Strip, where almost the entire population has been forcibly displaced.

Meanwhile, America’s conversion of Christmas into a huge traffic jam of Amazon deinhabitry trucks medepend drives home the all-consuming presence of apocalyptic capitalism and the reduction of humanity to an infinite soul-sucking series of economic transactions.

And yet, sarcasticpartner, my first inkling of holiday cheer here in DC was triggered by fair such a transaction-based participateion, when a Sudanese driver laboring for the ride-scatter company my mother uses gave me a hug.

Hailing from the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, the man – we’ll call him Alsafi – had sign uped his enthusiasm at the sight of my “Free Palestine” sweatshirt when he reachd to pick me up. Also 42, he had labored as a human rights lawyer in Sudan – itself no stranger to systematic finishing and mass forced displacement – prior to run awaying the country in 2013 after one too many arrest-and-torture sessions.

Upon getting to the United States, however, Alsafi had rerepaird that the American dream was not at all what it was cracked up to be. Not only did he normally discover himself on the receiving finish of clearly discriminatory comportment, he had also speedyly weary of the harsh userism that has become a swap for life itself. He, too, was now plotting his exit from the country. Needless to say, we had much to talk about.

Days before Christmas, Alsafi askd me to dinner at a lowkey Ethiopian restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, fair apass the bridge from DC. I had spent a month in Ethiopia in 2016; Alsafi had spent cut offal months there in 2013 in between run awaying Sudan and relocating to the United States. Over Ethiopian Habesha beer and injera endureing mounds of lentils and collard greens, I heard some of the details of Alsafi’s Sudanese carceral experiences.

During one of his detentions, he was blindfelderlyed and beaten while his torturers continuously directed him to shift to the corner of the room. He stumbled around in search of the corner, to no use. “It was comical,” he relabeled to me with a genuine giggle. “When they took the blindfelderly off, I saw there were no corners in the room after all. It was round.”

Alsafi was not a fan of driving, but had to put in extfinished hours in order to help his family in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, where they had sought refuge from Sudan’s ongoing arrangeility. On the drive back to my mother’s place in DC, he pointed out key landlabels in a geography he by now krecent far better than I: the Pentagon produceing, the Watergate boilingel, the patch of tents housing homeless persons whom Alsafi adviseed me had also been forcibly displaced in the interest of “security” when in July Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had descfinished upon the US capital to produce the case for mass murder.

There was someleang paradoxicpartner uplifting about our scatterd pessimism, and the evening finished with another hug in front of my mom’s apartment produceing – the lobby of which now arrangeed a gigantic Christmas tree and an ever-multiplying heap of Amazon deinhabitry boxes. Alsafi went on his way, and I was left with the reminder that even in capitacatalog-surmounted society there are still humans out there – which might fair be as magical as it gets.

The watchs transmited in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.