A Christmas Carol

Dickens gave us one codification of the suffering of the poor. He made them humble and noble and we have institutionalized this schema of compassion. You can even buy gold plated, limited edition, castings of scenes from a "Christmas Carol" if you want to flaunt your ability to separate sign and signified.
Years ago, when my son joined the cub scouts, I agreed to be a den leader. That Christmas, we took a list of addresses given to us by one of the churches, and took toys and food to the homes on Christmas eve. Most of the homes had a single mother and kids. Sad little dark places with measly trees or no tree at all. A lot of the women were ashamed, like they had done something wrong - made their kids lower somehow....it was bad enough they had to live like this, but we shun the poor, we take away their dignity, we are suspicious of them. "I mean, how screwed up do you have to be in this country to not be in the middle class?" - We love our aristocracy more than the lords.....
But this is all too easy to see. It is just one of the vast abstract billboards warning everyone that we are if nothing else as a species, egregious liars!
All over the world today there are great reunions, fine dinners with good will and love. There are homecomings and traditions kept alive and so much symbolism. All of this is marvelous. There is also the disunity, the disjunction; but it isn't the caricature of Tiny Tim or clean, hard working, noble peasants; it's 1 million women and children homeless in America, today. It's the jump in suicides this time of year, and the people who have slipped through the cracks. It's the preoccupation with doing the best for our own and how that group is constantly shrinking. It's the suspicion and psychologically antiseptic position we take with all of the strangers who are potential con artists, pedophiles, verbal abusers, bi-polars, gamblers, fatties, smokers, druggies, sci-fi nerds, players, haters, stalkers, voyeurs, cell-members, moles, demons, microbes, infectious agents, liabilities, .... ad nauseum -
Out of all the millions of strangers living alone and not invited to a good old fashioned Christmas dinner, how many were real threats? How many suicides this season would not have occurred if a single act of kindness had been shown to a stranger.
We used to think Chauvinism was bad. How Chauvinistic is it to go to the level of your own DNA?
Maybe all Dickens really did was let everyone off the hook? We can all say, "such a shame", and keep going.
Once compassion becomes an unwise financial risk, it becomes ritualized and ridiculous; more for the compassionate actors than the audience. We can pretend all we want to, we can set aside special days for kindness or love or gratitude, and put it in our scheduler, and do all the right things, like a huge heartless machine grinding beautiful ideas into porcelain nick-knacks.