Another COVID Christmas? Count our blessings

That's a temptation we should resist succumbing to. Christmas, irrespective of your faith or lack thereof, is a beacon of hope bookending the year and shining a spotlight on the generosity of the human spirit, the redeeming power of love and the joy of putting others before ourselves.

As anybody who has ever spent serious time on a cardiac or a cancer ward will tell you, there's always somebody worse off than you in the next bed or just down the hall. Now is the time to count our blessings, to give thanks for the kindnesses of friends and strangers, and to look to the coming year with renewed hope.

Some of the strangers who deserve our thanks include the multitude of researchers who have done such a wonderful job in creating the vaccines keeping us safe, the doctors and nurses who are literally working overtime to get jabs into people's arms, and the emergency workers - police, ambulance officers and nurses who have endured yet another gruelling year - giving up their Christmas to protect us during ours.

The same goes for workers in supermarkets, banks, restaurants, hotels and elsewhere who, even though Omicron cases are rising at an alarming rate, are masking up and turning out for work so the rest of us can make the most of the season.

And then there are our young people, especially recent school leavers, who have endured three Christmases of bushfire and coronavirus-induced chaos and confusion with a degree of stoicism that shames many adults.

They even include our political leaders who, while they haven't always got it right, have kept Australia a safer place during the pandemic than almost any other country in the world.

People can be pretty damned wonderful and now is the time for us to pause to acknowledge that fact.

Australians, despite any tendency we may have to focus on negatives, have responded to the pandemic well. While it would be wrong to adopt the Panglossian view that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" these are definitely just as much the best of times as they may be the worst of times for most. That said, there are many who were doing it tough long before COVID-19 raised its ugly head; people who are isolated by poverty, ethnicity, mental illness and a myriad of other challenges that all to often prompt us to avert our eyes and to turn away.

That has to change. All of the great religions teach we are all equal in the eyes of God. The humanists came to the same conclusion when they declared "man is the measure of all things". Unless all of us matter then none of us matter.

That's also true of the world beyond our shores. Christ, whose birth we celebrate on Saturday, was born far away from home and soon became a refugee in Egypt. How can we celebrate him without acknowledging the plight of those facing starvation and repression in an Afghanistan facing its worst winter in years? What are conditions like in the refugee camps in Syria? In Turkey? On the border of Belarus and Poland? What does the future hold for Africa's unvaccinated hundreds of millions?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if, after our own encounter with adversity, Australians emerge from this crisis with renewed compassion and a burning zeal to leave the whole world a better place than we found it?

That would truly be a Christmas miracle.

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