Jacqueline R. Torres
It’s the time of the year to celebrate life.
“A very Merry Christmas. And a happy new year. Let’s hope its a good one, without any fear. War is over, if you want it.”- “Happy Xmas (War Is
Over),” by John Lennon.
It sucks that the only time we talk about Lennon’s life is because of his death. I wasn’t alive when he was around, but I’ve been impacted by his love for humanity through out my life.
It was not his brutal and needless death that made me want to change the world, it was his music.
Lennon has been dead for 25 years and although he said “we all shine on,” the moon and the stars and the sun were stolen from the sky on the cold New York night of Dec. 8, 1980.
The man who walked through Central Park with a stethoscope listening to the pulse of the city through tree trunks, who wrote love notes to the world in the sand on the beach, who grew his hair for peace, has not been forgotten but his message remains in the vacuum of a Lennon-shaped hole in the night sky.
My dad played “HELP!” for me when I was 5 and then “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album when I was 6. I got the “White Album” from him to help me through puberty and later, “Rubber Soul” to help me through drug dependency.
Picture for a moment–peace of mind. Is it a credit card, a sport utility vehicle, a gas pump or the by-products of war mongering?
Or is it the wind blowing through your hair, visions of yellow and green cellophane flowers, and marmalade skies? Are your kaleidoscope eyes open to a life less burdened by the clutter of empty American commercialism?
For those who couldn’t see it, Lennon painted a picture of peace with his life, actions, love and music.
The Karma hasn’t been instant, but it has been steady. The advances Lennon and the yippies like him made in the love-revolution have been FCC’ed out of the mainstream.
His memory can now be purchased.
Peace is no longer a state of being but a marketing element to capture the buyer’s impulse of baby boomers, beats and all the yippies turned yuppies that came out of the Vietnam era.
When did ideas lose their luster? When did Americans become so obsessed with the material that the ideas behind things, the part that makes them beautiful, are lost to the vast expanses of American hypocrisy?
Why can a solider hold on to a photograph in the middle of a war and not hold on to the idea that all human life is equally valuable?
“And so this is Christmas, for weak and for strong, for rich and for poor ones the world is so wrong. And so happy Christmas, for black and for white, for yellow and red ones, let’s stop all the fight.”
The song “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” was written by Lennon and Yoko Ono and released Dec. 1, 1971 as the Vietnam war raged on and continues to have relevance today as another generation of people sworn to defend our country fight an unknown enemy under a contrived pretense.
War is senseless.
Death defies what we celebrate Christmas for- birth, hope, love, good will toward mankind.
As the year comes full circle, the end and the beginning, the extremes of “existence” – life and death- are summed up by two men who share these sentiments.
Their names both start with ‘J.’ And I’m sure Jesus would agree with John- “War is over if you want it,” bring the troops home for Christmas.