Although it has been a while, I've dealt with the notion of "Advent", what it's about, how it not only marks a change of seasons, but also what it means in a yearly sense.
There's no real need to rehash old themes. This year is not all that different from previous ones: there's too much trouble, pain, strife, war, death, and suffering going on out there; the greedy still can't get enough; the poor are still looked down upon, if they're not outright despised; the first salvos in the so-called "war" on Christmas have already been fired; and my own desire to hear a collective voice of reason in the hectic remains unfulfilled. Too few people care ... about any of what this "season" should bring; and even fewer are willing to budge even an inch out of their own self-righteous comfort zones to fill the season with any kind of reason.
Margaret Thatcher, the Female Godhead of Neoliberalism, maintained -- and her acolytes and adherents proclaim -- that there is no such thing as society; it is merely a collection of individuals. That is unchallenged dogma in the meantime, and even the briefest glimpse at anything calling itself news confirms its "truth". But, religions -- and neoliberalism has taken on this mantle -- cannot exist apart from cultures, so that is the next falsehood that must be destroyed, and all of us worldwide, though more markedly we in the West, are rallying to the Call for Destruction. Just like the often illiterate and ignorant destroyers of culture known as ISIS, even we non-military, supposedly peace-loving, non-violent types are just as effective as they are at destroying common history as well.
Without a society; that is, without some kind of social grouping that views itself as "us", it is difficult to imagine a culture forming. A culture, in this sense, the linguistic, artistic, musical, literary, and value-oriented backdrop that provides the context in which a given group can function. In certain regards it is all those unspoken rules, guidelines, customs and mores that let everyone knew "how things are done around here". That group will then organize itself in relation to other groups in civil (political) and economic (commercial) ways. Politics and commerce are, by their very nature, unable to support culture. Given the influence she enjoyed throughout the West, when Mdme Thatcher conceptually eliminated "society", she did as much to destroy our culture as Muslim radicals do when they go around blowing up cultural heritage sites or chiseling facades off of walls. We readily recognize the one, and deal very ineptly with the other.
Though only one example, it is indicative of why we find ourselves in crisis these days ... and everything has become a crisis. Whatever it was that made us "us" has been so weakened, so debilitated that we're left primarily with ourselves. And individuals are never a sound basis upon which to build.
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