Americans approach Christmas 2023 in a dark angry environment that has divided millions, even families and friends.  Bethlehem, even Santa Claus and definitely “Silent Night” seem far away and somewhat artificial. Two full scale wars, massive death and destruction in Europe and the Middle East and violence and hate elsewhere have definitely dimmed our Christmas Spirit.  

When I’ve been overseas and away from my family during Christmas, generally depressed, I remember an amazing event that happened over 100 years ago.   It always reminds me that there is a special human quality that Christmas can activate, regardless of existing conditions and emotions. 

There is no more dismal, discouraging personal situation than that found on December 24, 1914 in the cold, wet shallow, narrow trench occupied by  an 18 year old British machine gunner, named Bruce Bairnsfather. He was hungry, freezing and scared.  His unit,  the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment had been fighting the Germans  for 3 months. They ate stale biscuits and tried to smoke cigarettes, too wet to light.  And it was Christmas Eve. 

About 10 PM, he heard loud voices coming from the German trenches across the large field that separated them.  As he wrote after the war, he turned to the soldier next to him and asked: “Do you hear the Bochies kicking up that racket over there?” “ Yes, came the reply, they’ve been at it some time. They’re singing Christmas carols” Everyone in the trench stopped to listen. 

Someone then started yelling at them in English, with a heavy German accent. He was asking them to come join them.  With some suspicion, a British sergeant said, “you come halfway and I’ll come halfway”.  Nervously, the Germans and the British, left their trenches and met in the barbed wire filled “No mans land”.  What happened next is still remembered.  

They had a spontaneous Christmas party. Handshakes all around, wine was found and a soccer game began  Bairnsfather wrote years later that he couldn’t believe his eyes: “Here they were the common soldiers of the German Army and there was not an atom of hate on either side. “

There were other similar instances across the Western Front that day when  small numbers of Germans,  French, Belgian and British troops created their own peace on Christmas Eve.  On December 26, 1914, they resumed killing each other. 

WWI dragged on for four more years at a terrifying cost: 9.7 million military and 10 million civilians were killed. The wounded totaled some 21 million.

As grim as things seem to us this 2023  Christmas Season, they definitely don’t match what Bairnsfather and the other British and German soldiers were enduring on December 24, 1914.   

Tom Timberman is an Army vet, lawyer, former senior Foreign Service officer, adjunct professor at GWU, and economic development team leader or foreign government advisor in war zones. He is the author of four books, lectures locally and at US and European universities. He and his wife are 24 year residents of Kent County.

Charles Dickens was a darn good writer. Imagine reading A Christmas Carol for the first time—wowie! Thrills, chills, suspense, hilarity, and a villain you love to hate, until he becomes a hero you love to love. 

For years, I worked on an ambitious annual stage version of A Christmas Carol at a theatre in New England. Our script was an original adaptation that didn’t mess around with Dickens’ language, omitting just enough to keep the running time reasonable and get us out of any truly impractical special effects. The Ghost of Christmas Past did fly, though, and furniture moved magically, and a gravestone materialized out of thin air at the crucial, climactic moment. 

I knew I was making professional progress as long as I got a better title on Christmas Carol every year. I started as a stagehand, only responsible for moving props and sweeping up glitter during intermission, but I worked my way up the theatre food chain year by year through sound, lights, and stage managing, dozens of performances every December, and probably hundreds of rehearsals, when all was said and done. 

What I’m saying is, Dickens’ text is burned into some of my most deep-seated synapses, never to be erased. No doubt I’ll be muttering Belle’s, Fran’s, and Fred’s speeches from a wheelchair in a shadowy corner years from now, when petty details like my birthday and the name of my first pet have long since faded from my mind (…Another idol has displaced me, and if it can cheer and comfort you in times to come as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve… Father is ever so much kinder now… a bowl of Smoking Bishop Bob!). The words are rote enough in my mind now that they lose their meaning sometimes, but classics are classics because there’s always something new to be  found in them, if you look for it.

In a nostalgic and Christmassy mood this week, I watched one of the zillions of film versions of A Christmas Carol—the one with Patrick Stewart, magnificent as always, playing Scrooge. It’s easy to forget how good it is, how dazzling and formidable the language, how scary the ghosts, and heartbreaking the losses. And it’s easy to scoff at Dickens’ righteous indignation. Lighten up, dude! We’ve come a long way from coal scuttles and bedcurtains, and workhouses. 

But lo, I fear we have not come so very far at all. Consider the Ghost of Christmas Present, a merry, laughing giant so full of life that living things manifest themselves around him wherever he goes. He’s hiding shameful secrets, though, and his words gave me a new chill this year: 

Two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable… “They are Man’s… and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all, beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it! Slander those who tell it ye! Admit that for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!” 

I began to notice a creeping and distinctly uncomfortable sensation in my neck. We have different words now, but The Ghost of Christmas 2023 could make that very same speech. He might call the boy Propaganda, Conspiracy Theories, or Climate Denial. The girl might be Food Insecurity, or Medical Debt, or Refugee. We see them daily on our phones. They’re in detention centers on the southern border of the US. They’re standing in blood-spattered kibbutzim in Israel, and huddling in a landscape of unimaginable devastation in Gaza. They’re in subway station bomb shelters in Ukraine, and floating in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya. We see them and we ask, Are there no refugee camps? And the asylum systems, are they still in operation? 

The jolly Ghost’s warning is more pressing today than it was 172 years ago. The magnitude of the threats to those clinging, beseeching children has only grown, while our collective wisdom and foresight seems as scant as pre-redemption Scrooge’s. Are we living out the doom that scared Scrooge into mending his ways? Denial, slander, and factiousness still drive political and personal choices large and small, and of course the Ghost was right: they’re tools for avoiding responsibility, and they make it worse. With 2023’s much more global perspective, it feels as if we may not have much longer to bide until the end, be it through climate change, war, or disease.

If we choose take a seasonal Victorian ghost story seriously—which apparently I do—there is hope for us yet, in all the good old cities, towns, and boroughs in the good old world. Scrooge mended his ways. He was intransigent, ignorant, willfully uncaring, and fully committed to being “a tight-fisted hand a the grindstone,” and yet a tiny, invisible ember of imagination and empathy still glowed deep, deep in his core. As he began to recognize that all people share the joy and suffering of being human, that tiny ember brightened and expanded until its light and warmth filled every part of him. He laughed instead of scowled; he gave instead of took; he saved Tiny Tim and he loved his nephew Fred. And he was happier than he’d ever dreamed he could be. 

If Scrooge can give that ember a chance, so can we. The end is not yet here. 

Maria Wood traveled throughout the country as production and tour manager for award-winning musician David Grover, with whom she co-founded a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing education and fostering positive social change through music and music-making.  She returned to school mid-career, earning a BA in American Studies and a Certificate in Ethnomusicology from Smith College. More recently, she has written and taught on the meaning and impact of the musical Hamilton, served as Deputy Campaign Manager for congressional candidate Jesse Colvin and was Executive Director of Chestertown RiverArts. She lives in a multigenerational human/feline household in Chestertown. 

“Survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, as shorthand for Darwin’s 1859 theory of Natural Selection.

A critical feature of Darwin’s theory is that for any species to exist, members of that species must be so well adapted to their environment that they will survive long enough to reach reproductive age and reproduce.

Leaping forward to 1985, Usenet discussion groups created the Darwin Award as a tongue-in-cheek honor to be granted to those who, by exhibiting exceptional stupidity in accidentally killing themselves, assured that their particular genes were not fit to survive and contribute to the gene pool of future generations. 

Today we need a modified version of the Darwin Award, one that does not need to be awarded posthumously. I’ll call this new version the “Carbon Darwin Award”, or CDA. To be eligible for the CDA the recipient must not only be trying to take himself (the vast majority of Darwin Award winners have been men) out of the gene pool, but also children and grandchildren, his, yours, and mine.

Nominees for the CDA are easily identified because they are verbally self-nominating. Their favored mantra is “drill, drill, drill.” 

Oh, I could ask them to consult “Greenhouse effect” on Wikipedia, but what good would that do? The chance that science could have the smallest effect on what their cult leader tells them is slightly above zilch. Unfortunately, the credulous not just killing their own, they are taking yours and mine with them.

This is a difficult problem to explain succinctly, but I must try. Who knows? Maybe a “driller” will be curious enough to investigate.

In a nutshell, since the Industrial Revolution began in the mid-1700s, we have been exponentially taking gazillions of tons of carbon that was safely buried 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous era, and putting it into the air as carbon dioxide, a particularly potent “greenhouse gas” which is superbly effective in trapping heat. The greenhouse effect is our friend, to a point. Without it, Earth would be an ice planet. Problem is: we don’t want too much. Water vapor and a little carbon dioxide provides the warmth we need. Too much carbon dioxide not only works to dangerously increase the average global temperature of Earth, it also acidifies our oceans, being especially detrimental to creatures at the bottom of the food chain. 

If you wish, you can track the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, CO. Here, NOAA publishes monthly updates from their main CO2 recording station at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Measurements started there in 1960, so these charts do not show that CO2 in our atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution was at 280 ppm (parts per million) and at no time in the last 800,000 years had it exceeded 300 ppm. Today it stands at 421 ppm and is increasing by about 2.5 ppm every year.

Some of those who deny that global temperature is rising are like frogs in the cooking pot, where slowly rising temperature of the water is not immediately perceived to be a problem, that is, until it is too late. Some say “I don’t live near the ocean, so rising sea level is not a problem for me.” Others say “I don’t live in an area subject to hurricanes or tornados, so no big deal.”

But there are effects of climate change that affect everyone. It’s just that they’re not immediately obvious. Changing weather patterns are creating drought conditions in many areas where food production once was high. This is one of the reasons why we see so many people from South and Central America migrating north.

It’s not that we must immediately stop drilling; our economy and the world’s is too dependent on fossil fuels for energy needs. It’s that we must transition as fast as we can from dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear.

In sum, boneheads vying for the CDA who keep shouting “drill, drill, drill,” are sending the wrong message. Our grandkids will pay the price. 

Bob Moores retired from Black & Decker/DeWalt in 1999 after 36 years. He was the Director of Cordless Product Development at the time. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins University

The MAGA conservatives moved away from policy positions as a platform, years ago, when they discovered people’s feelings were more malleable than policy opinions. It took a while, but Parents Rights, LGBTQ+ Attitudes, State Legislatures’ Independence, God’s Christian Politics, and anti-liberty Federal Government as the enemy, became effective political assault nukes. 

But, there already existed an increasingly effective weaponized word: “abortion”. It had been introduced into the Republican electoral armory during Nixon’s re-election campaign and was eventually adopted.  Over time, it became a very powerful Christian-charged partisan  issue, recast as Pro-Life. The Democrats’ Pro-Choice struck many as too passive. And finally in 2022, the 50 year-old Constitutional right to abortion, was struck down by a more conservative Supreme Court majority.  

In the November 2022 mid-term elections, Democrats unexpected success was largely based on  the other party’s harsh state anti-abortion laws in the former confederacy. And then on December 8, 2023 the Texas Supreme Court denied a young woman’s request for an emergency exception to the state law forbidding abortions. It has become the highest profile abortion case since Roe v. Wade.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, had announced earlier his intention to criminally charge the woman’s gynecologist, if he performed the abortion. This case is receiving largely negative national and international media attention because the court and the prosecutor, ignored the obvious seriousness of the threats to the pregnant mother’s life and the likely still born infant. And for what reason?  Possibly to punish the woman and her family for wanting to abort the baby. Many would call it cruelty. 

Substitution. Given “abortion’s” sharply declining utility to the more radical Republican strategy, there was an obvious, immediate need for an equally muscular and divisive replacement. And the Israel-Hamas War provided it. It’s some mixture of  anti-Zionism, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, genocide of either or both, which has been translated into “anti-Semitism” on elite (Democratic leaning) university campuses”. It made its dramatic political debut at a 12/06/23 House Hearing, ,where Congresswoman Elise Stefanik interrogated the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania about their policies re  genocide threats to Jews. The three should have been guided by common sense, not their attorneys’ advice.

It was a stunning success for Ms Stefanik and has resulted in the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania’s head and an unsuccessful attempt to force Harvard’s out as well. There is little doubt that variations of the theme: “Democrats are anti-Semitic” will be used more and more by the other party during the 2024 campaign.  I also foresee more House investigations of liberal-leaning universities racial/ethnic biases. 

Conclusion.  I confess, I’m not sure it’s possible to criticize Israel’s Netanyahu Government, without being accused of anti-Semitism.  Or if it’s OK to urge more US/Western attention to relieve the Palestinian’s catastrophic humanitarian situation, without being accused of pro-HAMAS sympathies.  Predictably, a confusion  politicians will deepen.  

Just a reflection, but the Nazis’ murder of 6 million Jews during WWII – the Holocaust – led to the post-war allied decision to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the, then British colonial Mandate for Palestine. During the decades between 1948 (independence of Israel) and 2023, the prevailing image of Israel and Israelis in “Exodus”, carried with it a strong belief in Israel as David fighting the Arab Goliath.  The automatic US support for the defense of and economic assistance for, Israel was assumed by Americans..  

It would seem the Israel-Hamas War may contribute to the fading away of his perception. 

Tom Timberman is an Army vet, lawyer, former senior Foreign Service officer, adjunct professor at GWU, and economic development team leader or foreign government advisor in war zones. He is the author of four books, lectures locally and at US and European universities. He and his wife are 24 year residents of Kent County.

Facts and details do matter—so let’s review those as they pertain to the Sergeant First Class John H. Newnam Armory in Chestertown. A local architect has provided a somewhat thorough review of the Armory’s history online. Unfortunately, some of its dates are incorrect and, more importantly, it ignores what happened with the Armory during the critical period between 2005 and 2023.

The Chestertown Armory building’s current conditions—including the mold issues—have their roots in the flood damage that resulted from Hurricane Isabel in 2003 while the structure was still under the purview of the Maryland Army National Guard. Though the facility was still active, the issues were not entirely resolved at the time. In 2005, when the 115th Infantry Regiment was merged with another unit and moved to a new home base, the Chestertown Armory was abandoned and was declared to be surplus in 2007.

It was not until 2008 that the Maryland Department of Planning turned its attention to the disposition of the Chestertown Armory. In accordance with the Superfluous Armories Act, the town and county were given the right of first refusal. Initially, then Mayor Margo Bailey balked at the reported $2.4 million valuation, but following public concern over the property being sold to a private developer, the town consented to purchase the property for a reported $500,000. The intention was that the town would sell the parcel and be able to retain some control over who would purchase the property and understand their intention for the Armory. The town council heard proposals from five groups, including STAY!—Save the Armory: Yes!—a group of Chestertown citizens looking to safeguard the Armory. Proposals included a homeless shelter and soup kitchen, a space for religious services, and a conference center.

The Stay! plan, which turned out to be the only viable proposal, included lease commitments to support much of the plan, but hinged on a potential lease with Washington College for just over half of the available space. For reasons that remain unclear, the College chose to withdraw from the STAY! Proposal, which made the plan unachievable. As time went on it and became clear that the proposals presented to the town council were no longer under consideration, then College President Baird Tipson began what would become protracted negotiations to acquire the property. Mitchell Reiss assumed the presidency of Washington in 2010 and in December 2011, reached an agreement to purchase the Armory from the town. However, it would not be until May 2013 that the Armory was formally turned over to the College.

Between 2005 and 2013, the Armory stood idle—no maintenance was performed, no electricity or HVAC systems were utilized. Numerous storm surges over the years had infiltrated the building and there was a significant mold present. Structurally, there were many issues including broken windows and holes in the roof. The floorboards were warped and pulling away from the subflooring. In short, the building was in a significant state of deterioration with inoperable HVAC systems when it came to the College. In fact, deterioration had set in so much that the Chestertown Historic District Commission (HDC) granted the College permission at the time to demolish the rear additions to the building.

During the negotiation period with Chestertown, the College developed extensive plans for a 5-acre riverfront campus that would include an academic building, residence halls, and use of the Armory as a potential home for the Washington College Center for the Environment and Society (CES). As the negotiations dragged on, the College moved away from this plan due to the condition of the building and costs associated with remediation and renovation.

When the College finally took ownership of the Armory, it began to focus on the possibility of a hotel and engaged with a number of hospitality investors, many of whom were excited by the possibilities. As the investors explored the facility, each demurred and eventually withdrew. The issue: hotel investors would not commit funds to a hospitality project where mold was present. With the repeated storm surges causing water infiltration, it was deemed by the investors at the time that remediation would not safeguard against a recurrence of the mold issues.

The history of the Armory since the College took ownership is not monolithic. Indeed, since 2013, the College has had seven presidents and each has explored opportunities to make use of the facility. 

In 2017, President Shelia Bair engaged Torchio Architects of Centreville to provide planning to turn the Armory into student housing. The lead architect shared his concerns about the condition of the first floor of the Armory in particular and suggested that the College conduct site and elevation surveys.

The College then worked with DMS & Associates civil engineers on the studies which indicated that the entire building is in a flood plain and the majority of the building in a special flood hazard area. An elevation study revealed that the first floor sits just over two feet below the Base Flood Elevation. Upon reviewing these reports and the recurring water infiltration issues the building would endure, the project was set aside.

In 2019, Washington College President Kurt Landgraf began conversations with hotel investors Hersha Hospitality about the possibility of renovating the Armory as a hotel and conference center. As these discussions developed the pandemic intervened and stalled the project. But when current President Mike Sosulski joined the College in 2021, he saw great promise in this plan and the considerable potential benefits for both Chestertown and the College. He quickly revived the conversations with the investors regarding the plans to renovate the Armory building.

Since then, Hersha Hospitality has invested a great deal of their own funds exploring the project’s viability through various assessments. As these studies have attested, the deciding issue is not the structure of the facility, nor is it the College’s so-called neglect. While the Armory structure may have suffered a degree of deterioration over the past decade, the physical condition of the building is largely the same as when the College assumed ownership, which was already 10 years after the initial damage to the building from Hurricane Isabel, and six years after the building was left abandoned. 

The true impediment today remains the same as it was in 2013: remediation cannot provide any guarantee that the same persistent mold issues that have been present for nearly 20 years will not continue to be an issue moving forward. 

After nearly two decades of earnest, concerted efforts to revive this historic building, we are fortunate to have investors who remain interested in honoring the Armory, the community, and the region. Washington College will continue to work with the Chestertown HDC and follow the facts as they concern the Chestertown Armory.

Brian Speer is vice president  for Marketing and Communications at Washington College