I really enjoy this time of year, the pre-holiday season.
It feels like, as little Jesus’ birthday gets closer, something sweetens inside us—or at least that’s what we like to think. Lights and decorations are everywhere, with homes and streets shining bright to warm our hearts. But some folks have a good thermostat and don’t sweeten up at all. So, in this festive buzz, where people are meant to ‘calm down,’ some don’t: they light up their own lights. Not the cheerful ones, but the other kind—those that raise blood pressure from zero to a hundred in seconds. And with their lights come the decorations. The other kind, the ones filled with cursing.
Otherwise, the world is full of love and devotion.
This morning, during one of my regular trips to the supermarket with my wife’s shopping list in hand, I saw holiday love in action. A customer, around his early forties, approached an employee—a young man struggling to carry a wheeled platform loaded with boxes like a mountain—and showed him his phone, which had a photo of some product on it. With all the politeness he could muster, he asked:
‘Where is this?’
Even if the employee had responded with the first word that came to mind, no one would blame him. But here’s the twist: the employee was African and his Greek wasn’t good enough to decode such a… poetic way of asking.
The young man tried, with more politeness than the guy with the phone had, to find someone else to help.
But our friend was not just rude. He was impatient to a level that only extreme urgency could justify. Tell me because I barely have time not to mess myself.
‘I’m talking to you! Where are you looking? Where is this?’ he continued in fluent rudeness.
However, the employee had already spotted a colleague and signaled her. The girl came over—probably a supervisor since her uniform was different, with a shirt instead of a blouse—and before she could even speak, I realized (not surprisingly) that our friend wanted to know ‘where is this’ but first he wanted to know something much more important:
‘Where do you gather these people from here? They don’t know how to communicate!’
Something deeply human and sad happens when someone decides to attack a person instead of looking for a product on a shelf. The employee, with calmness even Santa Claus would envy, ignored the comment as if it were never said and helped him. The customer got what he wanted. The employee faced another small dose of daily racism (which I suspect happens often). And all of us continued pushing our carts as if nothing happened.
And so, with the star of Jesus’ birth guiding us towards something beautiful, we all move forward there. Or almost all of us. Or almost towards something beautiful.
Papa – Ratses
