Reality update for Advent*...


Here is the "little" town we will be singing and reading about for the next few weeks: Bethlehem

This is not how Mary and Joseph came into Bethlehem, but this is how you enter now. You wait at the wall. It's a daunting concrete barricade, three stories high, thorned with razor wire. Standing beside it, you feel as if you're at the base of a dam. Israeli soldiers armed with assault rifles examine your papers. They search your vehicle. No Israeli civilian, by military order, is allowed in. And few Bethlehem residents are permitted out—the reason the wall exists here, according to the Israeli government, is to keep terrorists away from Jerusalem.

Bethlehem and Jerusalem are only six miles apart (ten kilometers), though in the compressed and fractious geography of the region, this places them in different realms. It can take a month for a postcard to go from one city to the other. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, on land taken by Israel during the Six Day War of 1967. It's a Palestinian city; the majority of its 35,000 residents are Muslim. In 1900, more than 90 percent of the city was Christian. Today Bethlehem is only about one-third Christian, and this proportion is steadily shrinking as Christians leave for Europe or the Americas. At least a dozen suicide bombers have come from the city and surrounding district. The truth is that Bethlehem, the "little town" venerated during Christmas, is one of the most contentious places on Earth. [More]

The myths surrounding our most precious memories are not surrendered easily - and whatever pictures we want to enjoy in our minds will usually not be displaced by mere facts. This used to drive me nuts, until I backed off and made allowances not simply for those who preferred fiction to reality, but also for my own blind allegiance to how some things are.

The striving for absolute truth can be as pointless as the effort to maintain a myth. [Some farm bill justifications spring to mind, for example]

Maybe what we need to do is simply choose better which to let go.

* Yeah - I know Advent hasn't begun, but it's hard not so start the music when you have an extra Sunday after Thanksgiving

[via 3Quarks]

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