You see, I was in Switzerland, alone with no family and not many friends. It's then that Christmas shows its slightly darker face. You can walk the streets of Zurich late on Christmas Eve and you will see one distant foreigner after another, Africans, Middle Easterners, South Americans, most of them alone, just strolling around. There are a few Westerners as well, most of them probably Americans, Australians like me or Europeans with no family to go to. The Swiss, of course, are all at home with their families, including any friends you may have made while here. Ironically, many of them are probably spending their time bickering among themselves, it being the one time of the year they all come together and rub noses.
I'm not meaning to disparage the spirit of Christmas, by no means. The message of Christ, the message of Love, is one I'd hold up high any time of year. But it has a way of rubbing my nose in the failures of the Christian movement all the same. I can almost see Christ's message lurking somewhere in the shadow of the church and our self-congratulating culture but, out on the streets, where it counts, we have a blind eye.
This is part of why I hitch-hike still. I'm not poor, I'm not down and out, I'm not even lonely much, but a part of me won't let those things go. There is a very genuine side to people who know these things well, and a kind of blind eye and hypocrisy that creeps up on the comfortable middle class. Don't get me wrong, I'm an old hypocrite myself, just one that likes to keep his eyes open to it I guess, in the hope of kicking it down within myself.
