Winston Churchill was a man of great wit. Much of that wit came in the form of insulting barbs. It was once reported, “When Winston Churchill was told that Clement Attlee [former British prime minister] is a modest man, he said: ‘No doubt he is. And Mr. Attlee has plenty to be modest about.’”

But all joking aside, genuine humility is a beautiful and God-like trait. The first Christmas was really quite humble.

Perhaps that is why Christmas resonates in the hearts of many, even many non-religious people…because of its utter humility.

Of course, we Christians believe God became a man in Jesus Christ. But when He came, He didn’t come in pomp and circumstance, living in an ivory palace. He came in a humble and lowly way.

He didn’t even sleep in a bed that first Christmas. He was laid in a manger—a feeding trough for animals—in a smelly stable. Hay served as the baby’s mattress.

He did it voluntarily, as the Apostle Paul notes: “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”

One of the verses of the classic 19th century Christmas carol “What Child Is This?” asks, “Why lies He in such mean estate, / Where ox and ass are feeding?” At that time, “mean” meant, “Of little value; low in worth or estimation.”

Here is a lesson to us all. No one in this world, no matter how lowly, no matter what side of the tracks they come from, would find Jesus unrelatable. He is accessible to all.

Mary was a Jewish teenage girl, maybe 13 or 14. She was betrothed to be married to Joseph, which entailed more of a legal commitment to marriage than our modern day engagement.

They lived in Nazareth of Galilee in Israel, which was under the thumb of the Roman Empire. Later on, when one of the 12 apostles, Nathanael, first learned that Jesus was from Nazareth, he exclaimed, “Nazareth? Can anything good come from Nazareth?” It was viewed as backwoods.

The angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to let her know she was chosen to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy from seven centuries before: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Immanuel means “God with us.”

In her “Magnificat,” her song of praise to God, humble Mary is grateful to the Lord, “for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.  For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed.”

She has indeed been called blessed. Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was the greatest woman ever born. Even National Geographic had a cover story on her in 2015, calling her “the world’s most powerful woman.”

But through it all, Mary remained humble. Death entered our world through pride. Life came through Christ. Humble Mary played a key role in Christ’s coming. When she received the startling news that the Holy Spirit would come upon her so that she would give birth to the Son of God, she replied in humble obedience, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

Why that first Christmas? About 30 years later, Jesus Himself explained the whole reason He came: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” And He came in humility.

Humility doesn’t always come easy to most of us. My long-time pastor, Dr. D. James Kennedy, once quipped: “I hope you all heard my last sermon on humility. It was a masterpiece.”

True humility is beautiful, and it is extolled in the Bible repeatedly as a virtue pleasing to God. For example, James says: “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

When George Washington was a young man, he wrote out in his own handwriting a Christmas poem he saw in an English magazine that highlights the humility of Christmas. Some of the words include: “Assist me Muse divine to sing the morn, / On which the Savior of mankind was born; / …. Resign a while his glorious throne above. /  Beneath our form every woe sustain….That Deity should stoop to our disguise! / That man recovered should regain the skies!”

This Christmas season, with all of its hustles and bustles and overstimulation and stress, I think it’s good to stop and reflect on the humbleness of that first Christmas. As the 1858 Christmas Carol, “See Amid the Winter’s Snow,” exhorts us:  “Teach, O teach us, Holy Child, / By Thy face so meek and mild, / Teach us to resemble Thee, / In Thy sweet humility.”

Jerry Newcombe, D.Min.

When I watch TV with my husband Steve, a former athlete, I see superb ballplayers in basketball, baseball, and football exhibiting what immense discipline went into their sculpted bodies, what sacrifices they made to achieve their goals, what tremendous––almost superhuman––talent they have in effecting that three-point shot from mid-court, that spectacular triple play, that “you’ve been Mossed” catch in the endzone.

And I picture them as young boys watching Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, Tom Brady, and saying to themselves what Steve––his team’s slugger––said to himself in 1955, when, at the age of 14, he took the 3,000-mile train ride from New Haven, CT, to Portland, OR, to compete in the Babe Ruth League World Series in the Multnomah Stadium: “I’m gonna be the next Joe DiMaggio!”

It only added to that lofty ambition when the residents of The City of Roses greeted the teenaged boys by showering red, white, and pink roses on them when they got off the train.

As it happened, the star pitcher of Steve’s team got into a fistfight and was sent home on the next train. And that left Steve to face not only the 15-year-old pitcher Mickey Lolich, who became the three-time All-Star and World Series winner for the Detroit Tigers, but also 15-year-old Al Downing, who became an ace pitcher for the NY Mets and NY Yankees (and other teams).

“I was up three times and Lolich pitched me nine pitches I couldn’t hit,” Steve told me, smiling back at the memory.

But that humbling experience didn’t discourage Steve from continuing to admire and emulate his heroes DiMaggio and Mantle and Koufax, et al, and to engage in the sports he loved…both baseball and basketball, the latter of which earned him All Connecticut and All New England status, as well as the coveted New England Championship in 1959 in high school, and subsequently to become the captain of the Dartmouth College basketball team.

At the high school New England Championship game in Boston Garden: Pictured from left to right in ‘59: Tookie Gomez, Jimmy Hill, Steve, Maurice Sykes, Lindsay Haughton, with Coach Sam Bender.

Why? “Because when you admire someone and you want to be like them,” Steve told me, “You study what they do, how they act, what they say. You try to find out what the secrets of their success are, with the goal of achieving what they’ve achieved, or at least coming close. And that goes for farmers or hedge-fund managers, ballerinas or composers or astronauts, rich or poor black or white…that goes for everyone!”

Indeed, intelligent people who play sports realize when they’re quite young that the way to achieve your goals is to emulate the people you admire…their discipline, drive, sacrifice, demeanor, behavior. And to learn the lessons that only sports, not school, teaches: humility, how to deal with disappointment with grace, how to be modest in victory, how to be grateful for the gifts of health and talent that God has given you.

YE AND KYRIE KNOW ALL THIS

Certainly, the rap star and clothing designer Ye (aka Kanye West) is not stupid, as anyone who watched his interview with Tucker Carlson saw with their own eyes. He is articulate and thoughtful. He told Carlson that he was raised by a mother he loved and a father he idolized, “the most brilliant man.” His father, he proudly stated, was a member of the Black Panthers Party, a Marxist-Leninist and black power organization founded in 1966.

Before it was founded, Blacks and Jews comprised an influential alliance, with Jews contributing significant financial aid and both moral support and concrete assistance to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and many other Black organizations fighting for equality and against racism. Not to omit their collaborative efforts to enroll Blacks to vote, for which New York residents, Jewish volunteers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were savagely murdered in 1964 in Mississippi.

Yet given this history, quite familiar to Ye, he nevertheless tweeted on October 9, 2022, that his intention was to go  Def Con 3 on Jewish people, which to most people meant to wipe out the Jews who so irritate and enrage him, and that includes the power that he apparently believes the Jews in his life––his managers, agents, handlers, doctors, et al––seem to have over him.

And while spewing this hatred, he also insisted that he was one of the “real” Jews, ostensibly referring to the Hebrew Israelite group  or cult or whatever it is.

Kyrie Irving, too, the Brooklyn Nets phenom basketball star, is, like Ye, highly intelligent and thoughtful. But on October 27, 2022, he tweeted a link to an Amazon listing page for Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America, a 2018 film based on a book of the same name, which promotes Black Hebrew Israelite ideology, apparently theorizing, as Chaim Lax spells out, that Blacks were really the first Jews.

Clearly neither of these grievance purveyors have ever seen the massive number of proud dark-skinned Israeli Jews who hail from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and Ethiopia. In fact, Barry Shaw, author, journalist, and executive in the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies writes that, “white Israelis are a minority in the Jewish homeland.”

The film also includes denials that the Holocaust occurred, admiring quotes attributed to Adolf Hitler, and the vicious anti-Semite Henry Ford who claims that Jewish people worship Satan, as well as accusations that Jews controlled the Atlantic slave trade and currently control the media.

WHO ARE THE REAL VICTIMS?

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Hate Crime statistics, Jews remain the highest target of rampant racism in America, but it is rare to see any reaction from the media when Jews are assaulted, insulted, harassed, vilified, physically attacked and even murdered, not only in America but around the world. So, it was quite out of the ordinary when Ye was immediately and severely sanctioned by the advertisers who have made him a billionaire and that overnight he lost that status and was reduced––a big boo hoo here—to being worth a mere $400-million dollars

Kyrie, too, was sanctioned, suspended from playing for five games, and lost millions in advertising revenue, including from Nike, which cancelled his pricey contract. To his credit, however, he posted this tweet:

“While doing research on YHWH, I posted a Documentary that contained some false anti-Semitic statements, narratives, and language that were untrue and offensive to the Jewish Race/Religion, and I take full accountability and responsibly for my actions,” Irving wrote.” I am grateful to have a big platform to share knowledge and I want to move forward by having an open dialogue to learn more and grow from this.”

Note: YHWH, Yahweh, is the name for the God of the Israelites, which was the Hebrew name revealed to Moses in the book of Exodus.

A NATURAL ALLIANCE GONE WRONG

Why was the Black-Jewish alliance natural? Because Blacks had been slaves in Africa and America, and Jews had been slaves in Egypt for over 400 years. Blacks were always reviled minorities outside of Africa and Jews were always reviled minorities in every country they have been exiled to for the past 4,000 years, except for the United States of America, which is 246 years old, and Israel, which is on the brink of its 75^th anniversary.

Even today, Blacks in the U.S. represent approximately 14 percent of the population, while Jews represent approximately 2.4 percent of the population. Blacks have been vilified, marginalized, mistrusted, and, yes, lynched and murdered, just for being Blacks. Jews have been vilified, marginalized, mistrusted, and, yes, six million murdered in cold blood  simply because they were Jews.

But instead of these two naturally simpatico minorities supporting each other, we have the larger minority, Blacks, engaging in fulminating hatred of Jews for many decades––thanks to career race hustlers and brutal anti-Semites like the pompous pontificating racists––the Devils quoting Scripture––Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al Sharpton, Reverend Louis Farrakhan, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, as well as Barack Obama, “the Squad” in the U.S. Congress, and now Ye and Kyrie, to name a teeny tiny sample of Black hatred toward Jews. All of whom have taught their acolytes to consider themselves victims!

BUT IS IT REALLY HATRED?

The human race is driven by emotion. It’s nice to fantasize that we’re driven by empiricism, facts, objective truths. But both history and everyday life contradict that fantasy. Emotion rules the day.

The Number One emotion is fear, which we all witnessed as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the globe, forced children to miss two years of schooling, destroyed many thousands of businesses, frightened millions of people into taking an experimental, DNA-altering vaccine, often with significantly dire consequences, et al.

Jews are all too familiar with the emotion of fear, as are Blacks.

The second most powerful emotion is jealousy. Most crimes––including murder––are committed in the name of this raging sentiment, and lesser crimes and everyday hostility are also caused by the monster of green-eyed envy. Basically, the person with this curse of an emotion is saying: I want what you have and the fact that you have it, and I don’t have, makes me blind with rage, makes me hate you.

On the surface, it seems obvious that what Ye and Kyrie and the Jew haters who have weighed in on their behalf are experiencing is blind jealousy. “How come,” they seem to be asking themselves, “that with all my intelligence, talent, charm, connections, good looks and money, it’s the Jews who run Hollywood and the music business and the media and me???”

Objectively, numerically, these accusations are simply not true. Here, Rory Rochman, noted speaker on Jewish rights, addresses Ye’s admitted jealousy problem with Jews. But sticking with the issue at hand, human emotions, is it really jealousy?

After jealousy, the third and hugely powerful emotion is anger, an easy emotion to access, whether it involves dealing with an irritating relative, witnessing a boyfriend who hurt your daughter’s feelings, hitting a pothole that breaks your axle, even trying to reach your doctor by pushing 2, then 4, then 7, then more horrible music.

But fear, jealousy and anger are only three layers of the psychological onion.

There is a fourth, but let’s look first at where the rage of the Blacks should really be––but isn’t.

WHO SHOULD BLACKS BE FURIOUS AT?

Who has inflicted the most harm on Blacks? In a word…Democrats.

Who fought ferociously against President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed 3.5 million Black slaves for all time? Democrats!

Who created the Ku Klux Klan, which hunted down, tortured, lynched, and murdered Blacks during its entire tenure (from 1865 to today)? Democrats!

Who created the Jim Crow laws which mandated racial segregation in all public facilities? Everyone from Democrat President Woodrow Wilson to Democrat Alabama Governor George Wallace (“segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”) to Virginia Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, on and on and on––all Democrats!

Who fought fiercely against the Civil Rights legislation of 1964, which dismantled Jim Crow segregation, combatted racial discrimination, removed barriers to black enfranchisement in the South that banned poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures that effectively prevented African Americans from voting? Democrats!

IT GETS WORSE…

When all that failed to get rid of Blacks––as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, stated as her goal––Democrats figured that the sure-fire way to keep Blacks voting for them was to destroy their families and thus insure that they remain in poverty and especially in ignorance.

To that end, they created a welfare system with the following rule: I will support you, Ms. Black Woman, with housing, food, medical care, and childcare…no matter how many babies you give birth to…with one condition: you cannot marry! If you marry, your benefits will either be substantially reduced… or eliminated!

Poof! The one-parent home was created, where Black mothers still had to work to make ends meet, where their children had no inspiring or disciplining male role models, and where single motherhood exploded from only seven percent––when the War on Poverty began in 1964 under Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson––to 23 percent today.

…AND WORSE

In the Great Northward Migration between 1910 and 1970, six-million Blacks left the rural south for the urban northeast, Midwest, and west, many of them to New York, where a criminal public school system has kept them ignorant and unemployable to this very day.

That system has “graduated” thousands upon thousands of Black students who are unable to read, calculate, or even speak coherently. Inevitably, they find work with the neighborhood people who drive fancy cars, sport Rolex watches, and have huge wads of cash on hand––pimps, organized crime figures, and drug dealers. And then they end up in prison, often for life!

And who contributes mightily to this destructive system? None other than the president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1998 to today, Democrat Randi Weingarten, a woman former Secretary of State Mick Pompeo says “is a danger to our children.”

That’s right, Weingarten represents the teachers who have mal-educated generations of Black students, supports the preposterous construct of Social Promotion–– promoting a child to the next grade regardless of skill mastery in the belief that it will promote self-esteem––all while she engages in anti-parent screeds and is lionized at the Biden White House!

The public schools run by Democrat-controlled unions and benefits-infatuated teachers have only vile insults at the mention of Eva Moskowitz, the woman who founded the first Charter School–– Success Academy––in New York City––there are now dozens, with Black parents clamoring to enroll their children. These schools educate children largely from black ghettos, who pass the Regents with flying colors on MERIT, score high marks on the SATs on MERIT, graduate from high school and go on to top-flight colleges on MERIT, and then go on to lives of independence and success.

…AND EVEN WORSE

Then there was the Democrat idea of Affirmative Action, the policy of favoring individuals for college admissions who belong to groups regarded as disadvantaged or subject to discrimination. Of course, it was a crashing failure. In essence, it said to Blacks: Look, you’re not that smart or motivated or accomplished, but you can still succeed if you don’t have to pass these whitey tests to get into college.

Did the proponents of this plan think so little of the native intelligence of Blacks that they wouldn’t see through the tremendous patronization and insult it inflicted? Did the program itself fail to see that Blacks who “graduated” from inferior high schools would not only be unable to keep up with the academic burden, but would be further wounded by their failure to do so?

So, they tried another strategy, the truly horrific, nonsensical and basically illiterate-supporting Common Core curricula inflicted on students by the Obama regime. Yet another crashing failure by the liberals, leftists, progressives among us––unless you think that credit should be given for students who can explain how they arrived at 2 + 2 = 5!

THE LAST LAYER OF THE EMOTIONAL ONION

Underneath the paralyzing layer of fear, below the obsessive nature of jealousy, under the blind rage and anger, there is the devastating emotion of despair. Of feeling that it’s all too much, too impossible, too overwhelming. This is the stuff of clinical depression. This is the stuff of suicide.

After all, fear and jealousy and anger are mobilizing! What can I do? Which protest group can I join? Who can I wreak my revenge on?

But despair has no allies. It is lonely. It is scary. It is immobilizing.

It is also what Ye and Kyrie and the legion of anti-Semites are most afraid of, with good reason, as suicides among Blacks have recently escalated dramatically.

THE SOLUTION

Don’t despair! The absolute cure for Black rage, jealousy, anger, and despair lies in one simple word: Emulate!

Spend one month of your entire life living with an observant Jewish family, reading the Bible, learning of the extreme emphasis Jews place on family unity, education, philanthropy, and mitzvahs––good deeds that can range from a simple smile to building a cancer research center to rushing all over the world to help in disaster areas.

Study why Jews, because of vicious discrimination, were forced literally to create Hollywood, why they were forced to build some of the best medical and research centers in America because they were barred from internships and residencies, the list of survival strategies is long and impressive.

Stop your jealousy. Stop your rage. Stop listening to the screeching racist preachers and politicians who have told you that you were a victim starting in your mother’s womb!

Start joining us Jews in fighting the real enemy, the actual powerful forces that have kept you down, defeated, and depressed: Liberals, Leftists, and Progressive Democrats and a horrific public education system.

Or, alternatively, stay in your perpetual rageful victim mode and see how far you’ve progressed in the next five or 10 or 1,000 years!

©Joan Swirsky. All rights reserved.

David Warren: The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is a thing. Who’d have guessed progressive modernity would be humanity’s end? 

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The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is officially a thing, I learn from the usual reliable media sources. Its founder, Les Knight, advocates intelligent non-breeding.

While most World. Economic Forum and environmental crusaders only want the world’s population to be reduced by seven billion or so, Mr. Knight would like to eliminate the whole amount.

Like many other progressive people, he likes to flatter the young for their intelligence and wisdom. By coincidence, they are also our largest potential breeding group. Mr. Knight’s TV presentation (on Fox this week) goes like this:

“My plan is for everyone to think before they procreate, and if people really think about it, think it all the way through, and have the wherewithal not to procreate, which is a really big problem all over the planet. . .44 percent of young people are saying ‘no I don’t think I wanna do that.’”

“Just because they’ve thought about it.”

Now, I doubt that 44 percent of the young have come to this decision, formally, but they seem to be not breeding, and thus giving encouragement to the extinguishers.

Elsewhere in demographic trends: the world’s population is reported to have hit eight billion. If this is true, the counters predict nine, and perhaps ten, then an accelerating drop. For the world seems to favor extinction, and in the absence of sufficient babies, the live population is aging very fast. This is happening even in remote villages.

Grand United Nations plans for sustainable development, family planning, and decarbonization, are the largest international bureaucracies devoted to the goal of population elimination. But what if people resumed having babies? Would that not change everything?

While men can have babies, according to progressive belief, I wonder if they will when their average age passes seventy. Whether women, once they have attained this average age, will also be getting pregnant, I have no opinion. I have learned not to comment on the female body.

For the next generation or so, the population will rise from cumulative habit, but then it will begin crashing – almost everywhere.

Through the decades that I have been following the numbers (as a journalist, not a scientist), I have noticed that the more authoritative ones go consistently over the top, exaggerating the speed of population growth. They are also inclined to overestimate the current population, thanks, I think, to political and ethnic pressures to drive the numbers, usually up.

Indonesia and Red China are, I would guess, two of the most guilty of this. The Chinese have quietly conceded that 100 million of their citizens don’t exist. The Indonesians have tried to reduce the proportion of Christians, Buddhists, and others, in the gentlest possible way, by creating millions of imaginary Muslims. Indeed, I am skeptical of the size of the Muslim population overall, and this makes me less alarmed about Islamization.

On the other hand, the population of Africa may be going up quicker, as the number-crunchers are beginning to admit. It is not that the Africans are more fecund, exactly, but that they instinctively form families. They have a greater resistance to modernity, and while the international population may soon stagnate, it will then grow in Africa as it shrinks everywhere.

The future of the human race may thus be “out of Africa,” just as it was (supposedly) in distant antiquity.

So this is, arguably, the best news for the survival of homo sapiens sapiens. Only we, the non-Africans, are likely to disappear, leaving the whole planet free for any African excess.

Elsewhere, the reasons for decline are not, over-simply, the declining need for children to support us in old age. This cliche has satisfied the curiosity of social scientists for too long. The reality is a complex of associations with increasing wealth, and technological improvements.

Common attitudes have become less and less religious, and people cease to be impressed by old-fashioned moral certainties. They have decided to afford not only material goods, but spiritual luxuries. Today, they can believe what they want, instead of having to limit themselves to the plausible.

With increasing per capita wealth (universally) comes increasing arrogance, pride, and smugness; spoilt children, narcissism, and so on: all the spiritual markers of modernity. This cannot be precisely measured, however – statistics are useless for intangibles, and so they aren’t even gathered.

The result can however be verified. Fewer children are proportionally hatched, and then fewer in each subsequent generation.

Not just the tiny flat Maldive Islands may disappear beneath the waves as a consequence of global warming. Vast Japan will become so many uninhabited mountains; though sufficiently tall to keep sticking out of the water.

Population decline is already advancing in other rich, over-developed nations. And where the population is still growing, in places like Canada, Germany, or the United States, it is because governments encourage immigrants to settle in numbers sufficient to pay the pensions of our retired. This is, in effect, the latest form of slavery.

Yet it makes perfect sense, in the longer term, because as the immigrant streams dry up, the pensioners will also have dessicated. Not since the dinosaurs have we had such a die-off.

Were it not for Ukraine, I might think we had already reached the point where we couldn’t have wars anymore. There are recruitment issues in all the world’s great armies. But Mr. Knight can be pleased that euthanasia, suicide, and drug deaths are flourishing, especially among young males, now that they are no longer needed as soldiers.

Extinction follows from minute, but aggregate, changes in perception. Previously, for the majority, the desire to live was even larger than the desire to conserve coal or diamonds. Surprisingly, we didn’t need reasons to persist. Typically, we tried to live as long as possible. God, too, was generally perceived to be alive, and “an influencer” in human life.

Who’d have guessed that progressive modernity would be our extinction event?

You may also enjoy some of our most popular columns from the last dozen years:

Howard Kainz’s How It all Ends: Muslim and Christian Versions

Francis J. Beckwith’s Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?

AUTHOR

David Warren

David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist in Canadian newspapers. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2022 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.