For the season: Mary's Child pa ram pum pum pum Regardless of which culture, the care of babies isinviolate. One of the lessons of the WestAfrican Ebola epidemic is the utter inability of many to be healthy enough towithstand the effects of an evolutionary viral occurrence. Eradicating a virus like Ebola is like eliminatingTB and malaria germs, a futile exercise. What we need is not to stop a virus as it is to get human nutrition andliving standards healthy enough to withstand or live with it. A virus enables the evolutionary process to cross-geneticlines, and in the case of the Ebola, a virus in the wild crosses over throughbats, and perhaps, other means, into the human RNA and DNA. We now know that some humans are moresusceptible than others to the downside effects of the virus. So the language of fighting the virus and eliminating it isa hangover of a mindset that sees what did not fit before to be an enemy to bebanished rather than a new condition to which one learns to adapt. We would do better to focus on adequatenutrition and hygienic surroundings for everyone! Yakov ibn Nazareth, Iesu Kristo, and Jesus the Christ to thecontemporary faithful is established on the anchor data of his existence, likethe rest of the human race. Hedied. An ignominious death, crucified ona cross between two thieves in the telling that was so powerful that it pushedhis followers to create a universal story true for all and all time fromGenesis to Apocalypse. I was born into a storyteller's household within theMethodist covenant. A three act dramabegan with a prelude of an incarnation from above to earth, then Act I of anordinary human, Act II as one called to expend his life to the way life is, YHWH,a pious reference to life's infinite mystery, and Act III, when the lifestyleof obedience to YHWH is a costly enterprise unto death, bookended by theresurrection event that sent him back to heaven, to the bosom of Abraham! This was a neat overlay in an older story that saw humanitydisadvantaged at the gate (dejado),and thereby, needed to be liberated, like the Israelites when they were slavesin Egypt, or redeemed from the Zoroastrian eternal battle between good and evilwhere humanity always found itself captive of the demon, and/or in our time, savedfrom the clutches of one's own depravity, in the classic confession of Paul ofTarsus to the Romans: "For what I want to do I do not do, butwhat I hate I do." In the name of this Jesus, many stories were created,including some cross-fertilized elsewhere other than the Levant. The one familiar to me is of the little child,pa ram pum pum pum, that emerged fromRoman and Byzantium institutions to Zwingli and Calvin, Luther and Wesley ofthe Reformation movements, and now, post-Vatican II and contemporarytheologizing enterprises. When Thomas Malthus promoted "moral restraint" (aversion of family planning) and calculated that the rate of population increasewas way ahead of agricultural production, it meant as it means to today's IMF thatthere is not enough food to go around making survival of the fittest anecessary ingredient justifying competition through capitalism; some were goingto die anyway in order for others to live. Wedded to the Christ's salvific role and added to AdamSmith's advocacy of minimal interference in the law of supply and demand, oneunderstands Western economy; "democracies" latched on to the Wealth of Nations. In a reprise of Band Aid's "Do they know it is Christmas?" by Bob Geldof, originallyperformed for the famine of Ethiopia 30 years ago, now for the assistanceefforts in Ebola-challenged nations, Africans are not pleased with the imagenot only of white folks coming to the aid of disease-ridden and pest-infestedAfrica, but of Christians in predominantly Islamic Africa bringing theirRedeemer to save the unfortunate native Africans (read, Muslims) from theirhelplessness. It places the Christiansinto an awkward position, with some of ardent and over zealous members rippingoff the Koran in public as part oftheir witness and bait for their "crucifixion"! Obama immigration thrust focuses "on hopes rather thanfears", clearly an ethos promoted in the name of the babe in the manger, whichsome sectors in America fail to understand other than the need to conform tothe letter of the law and Boehner takes this to mean following establishedprocedures other than executive decrees, including the tactic of withholding fundsfrom White House. Of the three religions from the Levant, the Jews now insiston the Hebraic-ness of Eretz Israel; the warriors of the Iraqi-Syrian desertsare dubbed Islamic. Jefferson made surethe federation was not going to adopt a state religion, but Eisenhower's"nation under God" understood itself as Christian, a light on a hillof exceptionalism. Shall I play for you Pa rum pum pum pum On my drum Methinks Mary'sChild would rather we do not beat the drum anymore. But we can still hum pa ram pum pum pum! HappyBirthday, O Little One! ***** a draft for the Dec. 24 Saipan Tribune Jaime in China