ho arrrrrh ho!

The polar express took me to the frozen north! They have no internet, so i couldn't alert you.
(translation - vacation laziness)
Q: What is the only activity that makes you feel like both santa and a pirate?
A: Going home for the holidays. You start with a satchel of presents, and end up with a bag of booty.
As an infant crammed her happy finger into my right nostril on the train ride home today, i realized that of the three major forms of cross-country public travel, train is the only one in which the "normal" rules of society are suspended, and people treat each other more like we're supposed to all the time. For only on a train, do tiny children run around and interact with any stranger they might wish. It doesn't happen on planes, because of paranoia and elitist pretension. It doesn't happen on busses, perhaps partly because bus trips are often shorter than train trips, but mostly because of one seemingly insignificant detail - trains are carpeted. Busses are not.
Whatever the reason, tiny children on train trips often are, for one brief moment in their lives, exempted from the fear of strangers we vomit into their sweet heads on every other day of their maimed, crippled lives.
A message of holiday cheer, you ask? I can actually do one better.
Any intelligent person would look at this world and conclude that humans are flawed, and that our time on this planet will very, very soon be done. It's all over but the fiddling, and the universe will soon be well rid of us.
That's a perfectly reasonable conclusion, and to hope otherwise is laughable, pie-in-the-sky naivete.
And yet...
I want to tell you a story.
During the trench fighting in World War I, the opposing sides could hear and speak to each other like no war before or since. These were professional killers, mind you. Well brainwashed into the zero-sum mentality that pervades humanity - kill or be killed. Most people have little or no awareness of how brainwashing is a natural part of becoming a regular member of society...but many have at least a glimmer of the fact that a profound and merciless process is required to turn the average many, moe, or mabel into a regimented murderer.
And yet...
Time and again, it turns out, in locations too numerous and far-flung to be statistical aberration, these systematically dehumanized humans with their fingers literally on the triggers, defied the rules of the game. They said NO to duty. They said NO to patriotism. They found ways to NOT kill or be killed. In their long standoffs, each side was required to shoot a certain amount of ordinance every day. So they eventually took to firing their loads like clockwork, never changing their aim or the time of day...until both sides knew, down to the second, exactly what was coming, and where.
And then, whenever some officer made an inspection, these soldiers would conjure up feats of death-defying bravery, perhaps zig-zagging across a field being shelled and coming out the other side unscathed. It is a certainty that many medals, and probably no small number of promotions, were awarded on both sides for nothing more than brazen wool-pullery.
Can you know that these things happened, and still abandon ALL hope for our species?
Neither can i.
merry maxmas,
wrob