Drum solo about caring for others

There’s always been one Christmas carol that makes me tear up, and it does so almost every time on the same line. Today, I realized that while I was right to get emotional, I was missing the biggest point in the story that the lyrics tell.

I’m trained in the study of complex systems, a relatively new science made possible in part by the development of computers. Among other things, the field is concerned with the whole being more than the sum of its parts or, more precisely, with the fact that things don’t always combine by addition.

We all know about this effect. For example, the overall nature of a group of strangers may be far simpler to understand than that of the same number of members of a family or a team or a society. We find this difference important in part because it is crucial to our success as a species, to our ability to survive, let alone thrive.

Love, team spirit, trust — the ties that bind also protect and nurture, and not just among humans. Flocking is not altruistic. Some say that God is everywhere and that God is love. It is fitting, though not compulsory, to sanctify what makes our lives possible.

I tear up at the line “I played my best for Him” in “The Little Drummer Boy.” The boy is poor and gives all he has for the baby who is the incarnation of love. He seems to fear that his gift will be unacceptable to a family that has received gold and other precious substances from the Three Wise Men. I tear up because no matter how great the abilities of any individual, they are mean beside the power that makes families and teams and societies of individual people, as they are beside the staggering need to fight suffering of all kinds. One is humbled and ennobled, aware of power and helplessness so poignantly that the tears well up and even fall.

All this is true, but it misses a larger point. The gift of the drummer boy is as important as any other that the baby receives. The gift of the drummer boy is irritation of those who fail to value poor people like him.

A bit of noise is vital to the manger scene, because before the drummer boy arrives, the innkeeper and the other guests are sleeping comfortably in beds while a woman recovers from giving birth to a child in a miserable space intended for animals. The inn was not a Hilton, some vast edifice in which guests would be insulated from the travesty happening at the front desk when Mary and Joseph showed up. Between then and the arrival of the Magi, someone could have made a sacrifice and improved Mary’s accommodations, but the people at the inn could be modeled very simply by addition. There was no love to produce complexity, no empathy to create a link between the heart of a guest and suffering people, one of them about to perform the lifethreatening task of giving birth, in the ancient world, no less.

Picture it: A bunch of angry, selfish people tumble from their beds and run to the manger, ready to cuff a little boy across the ear for making a racket, when what to their eyes appear but three — count them, three — kings with armed guards. The guests would quickly curse themselves for having lost the opportunity to benefit from the gratitude of kings, three of them, for giving up their cozy bed so that the object of the kings’ adoration and the mother of the object might have had a slightly easier time of it. The innkeeper, on the other hand, would have been very concerned about keeping his head attached to the rest of him as he looked nervously at the edged weapons of the guards.

Today, we know that the climate crisis could soon make large portions of some poor nations uninhabitable, creating a refugee crisis of staggering proportions that could contribute to destabilization of our civilization by midcentury. Few, if any, would survive the fall of our planetary technological civilization, so their own interests demand that the rich begin to love the poor. Not doing so would be like the innkeeper slapping the drummer boy in front of the kings and their guards.

I’m begging everyone who is silent to start making some noise about the global polycrisis. It’s as easy and necessary as love.

Rum-pa-pum-pum.

James Lyons Walsh, of Albany, amazed to find them available, recently registered the URLS godispoor.org and the ironic godispoor.com to amplify his drumming.

The gift of the drummer boy is as important as any other that the baby receives. The gift of the drummer boy is irritation of those who fail to value poor people like him.