Well, it is that time of year again. Across the land, thousands of children are pretending to be asleep - waiting, bleary eyed, for santa to show up. In Australia/New Zealand, they have already ripped through the gifts, and of course, most of the kids of Northern Europe, who opened their gifts on the 24th, have already managed to break a substantial portion of theirs. People who celebrate different holidays have of course long since given, received, opened, broken, and returned their gifts. Parents, meanwhile, are lamenting the fact that they can no longer hold the threat of santa not showing up over their children; as grandparents all over the world make it so obviously clear that it matters little just how rotten the kids are; santa still comes to them. Good thing there is still the threat of leaving your kid screaming in the aisles of the local Walmart.
All this signifies something much deeper, and no, it is not that mom's and dad's just lost, for another 11.5 months or so, the only method they have of controlling their children. It signifies that we haven't truly managed to impart the meaning of kindness and the spirit of compassion in what we do. It is apparently something we practice just once a year, primarily to people we know, and partially through gift boxes put up in the supermarkets, instead of thinking about what we can do to make life better for others throughout the year. As a counterpoint, there wasa stunning amount of kindness shown in the aftermath of the recent terrible windstorms that left somewhere around four million people without power around the Pacific Northwest. We, and everyone else who were without power for less than the eight days we were, or longer, are extremely grateful. If we could only somehow bottle and retransmit that type of compassion... Once upon a time, a politician talked about compassion. That was before he got elected, whereupon he rapidly decided to show that compassion by going and attacking various small defenseless countries, who obviously needed some true christmas spirit, a different system of government, and, according to what seems like a disturbingly increasing contingent in the U.S. government, a different faith. To date, about 600,000 people have succumbed to that type of compassion.
The spirit of the holidays did not reach all this year. MSNBC had a gem in their usual "Picture of the Year" competition, which, much in keeping with the spirit that seems to be imbuing the United Nations, the U.S. Congress, and the European Parliament, does not contain a single picture depicting the horrors inflicted on the poor people of Darfur. (One could include the White House in that list, but in the case of the aforementioned it seems to be a case of knowing, passive neglect, whereas with the latter it has not even reached that stage; probably because there is no oil there). The competition, of course, seems to have more sports pictures than actual news shots, which makes some amount of sense, because living vicariously through the imaginary triumphs and tribulations of a few overpaid, underworked, and for the most part utterly useless high-school dropouts, is much easier than facing what really happens out there. The competition also had one of the best pictures I have seen in a long time though: http://in.news.yahoo.com/060201/137/62atg.html, taken by Adel Halim. It truly showing what life is like for some. We have so far to go.
Another year has passed, and as we can see all around us, poignantly so in the information security world, where there has been a marked shift away from the hacks for fame, toward the zero-day based hacks for profit and national supremacy. That world has at least changed. But, it is a crab-eat-crab world out there still. It seems hardly better than it was, and too few people still seem focused on leaving it a better place than it was when they came into it.
Talking about crab-eat-crab though, I got a picture showing just that when I went diving with George today. It seems a fitting metaphor for what happened in 2006.