And in despair I bowed my head; ‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said, ‘For hate is strong and mocks the song. Of peace on earth, good will to men. I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow / Jean Baptiste Calkin This past weekend brought the first Sunday in Advent. Liturgically, Advent is not part of the Christmas Season, which begins on Christmas Eve. Quite the contrary, it’s a time for vigilance rather than joy, based on the belief that something or Someone wonderful is coming to uplift men’s souls. But in the corporeal world, the Christmas Season has already begun, with decorations everywhere, nonstop cable Christmas movies, and Yuletide music all around. The last category gave me an idea. There may not be Peace on Earth right now, but there are more peaceful spots than last year. All my life, I’ve heard the most common cliché of the season — Peace on Earth and goodwill toward men. This is a secularized misrepresentation of the actual Luke Gospel line, Glory to God in the highest and on Earth peace to people of good will (Luke 2:14). Specifically, men in general shouldn’t get a blanket best wishes — only good men and women. However, I dismissed the phrase for a long time, aware that on the Tolstoyan scale, War far exceeded Peace on Earth. I was too young to fight in Vietnam, but a couple of older kids in my orbit were scared to — and of — death in 1972. I remember one friend looking ashen when ordered to report to the draft board with a low lottery number. He came back beaming. “I don’t have to go,” he said. “That’s great, Jerry,” I said. “How come?” “I told them I was allergic.” “Allergic to what?” I asked. “Little yellow men trying to kill me,” said Jerry. It was a politically incorrect time. I paid some attention to the Vietnam War after that. I recall feeling disgusted watching the 1975 fall of Saigon on the news, sorry for the men who died for nothing, and glad Jerry wasn’t one of them. But nothing enraged me more in college than nightly viewings of Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline citing day number something of America Held Hostage. That is until the then worst President in American history announced the deaths of eight servicemembers in a catastrophic hostage rescue attempt in Iran. But then came the 80s, and a kind of Pax Americana for the whole decade. If you didn’t count the Cold War, which our President won, and a four-day firefight in Granada, which our country won. Maybe I should’ve given more thought to the Christmas carols at the time, and the peace on Earth bit, but the decade’s other music and the movies were too good. You couldn’t say the same for the 90s, or the goofball President that led into them. The New Year had barely started in 1991 when the Gulf War did. U.S. troops performed magnificently, better than the President did in stopping it. Later that year, he was totally surprised by the most momentous event of the second half of the 20th Century — the fall of the Soviet Union, from the strategic blows his predecessor had dealt it. “We were stunned,” wrote Bush National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. “The coup was a complete surprise.” A worse surprise came 10 years later, at the turn of the century. Nearly 3,000 people murdered in New York and Pennsylvania by 19 jihadists. The military response by the President lasted a lot longer than his father’s Gulf War — nearly 20 years of war. It ended much like Saigon, with Americans fleeing and people falling off aircraft wings, under the command of the now worst President in American history. And while he was President, two more major wars broke out — one in Europe, another in Gaza, after Hamas slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and brutalized more innocents. The current President ended that last war, and is working hard to end the other. He has also helped to stop several other military conflicts, such as India versus Pakistan and Thailand versus Cambodia. There may not be Peace on Earth right now, but there are more peaceful spots than last year. Tragically, one of them is not Nigeria, where, so far this year, 7,000 Christians have been killed. The jihadists responsible aren’t men of good will and don’t merit our own. They deserve a less cheerful American response. But America itself is plagued by mindless hatred. I’m not referring to the godless educated class that dominates the Democratic Party, like those who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination and murder their own unborn children. Only God can help or punish them. But the lost black youth for whom life has little meaning, who blast each other every night in Democrat-run cities, who assault helpless white people in packs and hurt them to the point of death — many of them know no other way. There are no fathers at home to teach them. But if I could give them some advice, it would be this, as ridiculous as it may sound to them: This Advent-Christmas season, apart from guttural antihuman rap music, listen to a few classic Christmas carols of the sacred kind. Before your teachers and leaders indoctrinated you into the hopeless pit of racism, your grandparents and great grandparents created and sang Gospel, the most gorgeous, angelic American music ever heard. Some of the Christian carols have the same soul–stirring poetry put to brilliant melody to welcome, not darkness and death, but something or Someone wonderful. READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: A Great American Thanksgiving The Wreck of Feminist Hollywood A Gut Punch in the Culture Fight Have yourselves a romantic little Christmas. Get your love interest my Yuletide romance fantasy novel, The Christmas Spirit. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever fine books are still sold.