“We'll take a cup o' kindness yet, For Auld Lang Syne.”

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”

— Ebenezer Scrooge

Another year has gone, and as I look back I wish I had a Ghost to show me the significant moments. As I learned from Neal Postman in Technopoly, every technology carries an agenda, and our phones, in offering the ability to document every moment, seem to assert that memory is irrelevant; that the human mind is too fallible to be trusted with something as important as what has happened and is happening and will happen. Well, I reject that with every force of my being. For who can tell the self what is happening to it, other than itself? Even (or especially) those of us who believe in an Authority who can supersede the self, must yet work to distinguish between those words the self wishes to hear from the Word and the words the self needs to hear from the Word. Technology ought to be a tool, and nothing more. Those spectres of Ignorance and Want, which have haunted mankind since before Dickens named them in A Christmas Carol, have not been driven away by the information age. So take a cup of kindness (and I mean actual kindness) this year, for old time's sake, and pass it on. God knows we need it.