I’m impressed by the touching faith most bicyclists have in the teeny quarter-sized tail lights on their bicycles (if they have them at all) or the reflectors on their pedals. Trust me, gang, at night you are almost completely invisible.

I do a fair amount of night riding…quite a bit more now that I have been riding to Rogue Theatre rehearsals for Our Town.

I never ride a motorcycle at dusk, or after dark, without shrugging into my reflective vest. Motorcycles are too often “not seen” by car drivers not to make a maximum effort to be conspicuous.

Most motorcyclists tend to think they’re perfectly visible because they have a headlight array that would burn holes in the retinas of oncoming motorists. In fact their single tail light is often lost in the light clutter of the cars ahead of them in a line of traffic.

Bicyclists at night are the invisible men of the road. People with an interest in bicycle safety should make a maximum effort to get their fellow riders to be more reflective.

I think the answer is yes. Although there is considerable thunder on the left in opposition to the escalation of troop forces in Afghanistan, it seems that most Americans are in favor of pressing on to “Victory.”

This victory is being won at the cost of multiple redeployments of the men and women of the armed forces, some of whom have returned to the conflict three or more times.

The burden of sacrifice should be spread across the whole of a society that seems clearly in favor of pressing on.

A reinstatement of the draft is clearly one way of doing this.

“Peace on earth, good will towards men.”

It’s a fine old season, a good old season, the best old season of all the good old seasons in the year. It’s  jolly and merry. It’s a mistletoe and holly berry time when grudges and spites are set aside and when for some few short weeks it seems there might really be a little good will towards men. Or at least it used to be.

As a motto for the current Holiday Season this Peace on Earth thing looks as dead as a door-nail… Although, as Charles Dickens once observed, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail I don’t know. “I might have been inclined, myself,” he said, “to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it or the country’s done for.”

This year no place on earth is less likely to capture the spirit of  the old motto about peace and good will than the Holy Land. In that little patch of ground, sacred to three of the world’s great religions, there seems little promise of peace and precious little good will.

The Israelis and the Palestinians appear to have settled on explosion as the most efficient language of political discourse. The Muslims, when not blowing up Jews, are casting around for ways to blow up the rest of us; and  the Christian leader of the world’s only hyper-power (that’s us, gang) is  taking the Crusades as a model for rational dispute resolution.

Ordinary folk, when they find that something doesn’t work, try something different. Not these guys. They have stumbled on a strategy for resolving their differences that even the dull normal among us recognize isn’t getting the job done. When it doesn’t work they simply take up the same old cudgel and try it again. Harder. More explosively.

Sniping, bombings, and savage little fratricidal conflicts around the world are the order of the day. The people responsible for them have unleashed pestilence, famine and death on their fellow citizens, frequently on the grounds of differences of religion. Or sometimes over differences of oil reserves.

Forgive me for pointing out that it ain’t  the rational humanists who are out there whuppin’ other folks in line.

What would peace and good will be if ever we could achieve them?

Peace is not simply the  absence of war;  good will towards men is something greater than simply leaving them alone. The word  “peace”  is more nearly a verb than a noun. It suggests a  continuous activity rather than  a condition we can passively enjoy while we turn our attention to other things. It is not something we have, but something we do.

If there were a word for this activity it would be “peacing.”

Nor is peace that quiet serenity of the spirit in which all our personal disturbances are dissolved and set to rest. It is not the peace of the expression “He is at peace now,” which is what we say of the dead.

A world at peace is not a world without problems or challenges. Nor is it a world in which we don’t know personal anxieties, sorrow or despair. It’s a world in which the human spirit is freed to be constructive rather than destructive. It is a world in which  human energies can be channeled against anxiety, sorrow and despair wherever they are found.

Peace and good will are connected in very practical ways. War, even in a righteous cause, is costly: In human energy, human life, suffering, and money. It is the great corrupter of good will.

However much you wish it you cannot simply settle for the state of not-being-at-war and then proceed to ignore poverty, disease, or hunger in other parts of the world. Those are the causes that drive people to make war in the first place.

Since we started with Dickens let’s remember the pain of Marley’s ghost: That he cannot now intercede to help the sufferers he sees around him, and that he did not do so in life. For him good will toward men was simply letting them alone.

We need a second motto for the Holiday Season, one which is not a goal to strive for or a hope to be made real but which, sadly, reminds us of the principle upon which the world is now acting. It reminds us of what now, and in all the year to come, we should struggle to avoid.  I saw it once posted as a sad little note in the break room of a place I worked…

“The beatings will continue until morale improves.”