"Let There Be Light!"

The difference between the hippies and the Tea Party is that the term "hippies" was broadly applied to any young person who wore their hair long and was suspected of smoking dope, while the Tea Party is a more or less organized structure of loosely affiliated chapters. You are either a member of one of those groups, or you are not. Back in the day, there was a political activist group called "The Weathermen", or "The Weather Underground". I'm pretty sure that all the Weathermen were hippies, but not all the hippies were Weathermen. Then there were lots of weathermen on TV that were none of the above. The difference between the political Weathermen and the TV weathermen was whether or not the "W" was capitalized. If you called a TV weatherman a "Weatherman", it would be inaccurate and possibly slanderous.

Ironically, there is currently a show on the Weather Channel called "The Weather Underground", which, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with the political group of the 60s. The original Weather Underground must have disbanded and the name must have passed into the public domain by now, or somebody could be sued for using it inappropriately. Of course TV weathermen are now called "meteorologists", and half of them are women. There is also something called a "climate scientist" which, as near as I can tell, is a weatherman who doesn't appear regularly on TV. I suppose it would be accurate to call me a "tea partier" as long as you didn't capitalize it, but I prefer to be called a "libertarian", with a small "l". If I was still a card carrying party member, you could call me a "Libertarian" with a capital "L", but I'm not. I know that you don't care much for capitalization, but it's used for a reason, to avoid confusion about things like this.

The reason I brought up that old hymn was not to convert you to Christianity. I just always identified with the image of an ordinary person, perhaps even a child like I was when I first heard it, holding up his feeble little lamp and saving a poor fainting, struggling seaman in the process, kind of like that old saying "Better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness." Light has long been used as a metaphor for truth or knowledge, as in "enlightenment", and organized religion certainly does not have a monopoly on enlightenment. Here are the other two verses, just substitute the word "error" for "sin", and you'll see what I mean:

"Dark the night of sin has settled, while the fearful breakers roar.
Eager eyes are watching, longing for the lights along the shore."

"Trim your feeble lamp, my brother. Some poor seaman, tempest tossed,
Trying now to reach the harbor, in the darkness may be lost."

You may know that Jesus was probably not born on December 25. That date may have been chosen because it coincides with an old Roman holiday with the intent that the Romans wouldn't know if the Christians were celebrating Christmas or the Saturnalia. I think, however, it's more than a coincidence
that Christmas comes hard upon the Winter Solstice, the time when the nights start getting shorter and the days start getting longer. We call it "the first day of winter" but in Europe it is celebrated as "midwinter". It seems that, because of ocean currents or something, our seasons run about a month later than the seasons in Europe. European pagans celebrated the solstices and equinoxes, and the encroaching Christians knew better than to try to talk them out of such an old tradition, choosing instead to assimilate it. Similarly, it is no coincidence that Easter comes near the Vernal Equinox. Indeed the name likely comes from the old fashioned word "Oester", which means "time of eggs" or something like that.

So, call it what you will, have a happy holiday, and always keep moving towards the light.