First World Problems From The Former Third World

A recent BBC article ran with the subheading 'We knew Christmas before you' - the Band Aid fallout.

Here is my response to a BBC article you can find at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9dl22gz3vlo.amp

If my country was the recipient of donations of cash from millions of people from halfway across the planet* I don't think I'd be grumbling about the lyrics of the song used to promote the initiative.

I have the original 12" Band Aid record. The cover, by Peter Blake (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band etc.) is a beautiful collage of cliched Christmas imagery, mostly medieval and Victorian in origin with the exception of a black and white image of malnourished children. These coloured images are a good representation of much what we, white westerners, regarded then as the spirit of Christmas.

The record art captured some of the dreamy Christmas card aesthetics of the time. Posted by the millions in the 1980s, Christmas cards somehow represented what we wished Christmas to be; a time imbued with a spirit of goodwill, helped along with a dollop of sentiment and wishful thinking - and sometimes with a sprinkle of glitter or some fake snow from a can.

For most of us, Christmas has a lot more to do with things like the smell of pine needles and mince pies than it has to with Jesus Christ. For a huge chunk of the western world, the Jesus fable is just a plot device to propel the celebrations forward. And we do without fail every year, despite a drastic decrease in believers in what someone else would naively call the real spirit of the season.

If the world stopped believing in God or the nativity of little baby Jesus, for the most part Christmas would continue as merrily as ever. There’d be just as much boozing and binging of TV. Just as much overspending (perhaps even more) and you can be certain that for another fifty years or more hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people, will still find something beautiful in the refrain “Feed the world; let them know it’s Christmas time…”

I doubt Ethiopians of old were singing Silent Night and Jingle Bells or decorating trees with baubles and flickering lights. Just as they were unlikely to be eating Christmas cake or stollen; or pulling crackers while enjoying some fine stilton and port. What Christmas celebrations they were engaging in were unlikely to be even remotely close to what we regarded as Christmas in 1984. And that's all that was meant by the song.

Do They Know Its Christmas was a pop song designed to make money to send to Africa to help save the lives of starving children. The reason those children were starving was mostly due to local corruption and civil war. Most of us did not know this at the time. All we saw on TV were images of swollen bellies and little faces full of flies.

In the end, 1.2 million people died of starvation and other unnatural causes. It was a catchy song that we all loved. Yes, it was a little innocent. but we were only trying to help.

*Including from many children; what kid in 1984 didn't want to help a starving African child and get that Africa guitar sticker after donating!