Happy holidays, indeed!

And here now is the Nitpick of the Year.

It is about Christmas and how we have started to refer to this season as “holidays”. Some people don’t like that and some of them think it is something of a sacrilege to simply say “Happy Holidays!”

It should be “Merry Christmas,” they say because simply saying “Happy Holidays” removes the Christ from the center of the season.

Now, isn’t that stretching things a bit  much too much? Just how can greeting people “Happy Holidays” relegate Christ from the celebrations is beyond me. Using “Happy Holidays” does not mean we’ve refocused Christmas; it plainly and simply means we want variety in our greetings. 

Isn’t it amazing how we can weave things out of nothing, see things where there aren’t and complicate what is not? To think how people can spend time and energy trying to convince people not to say “Happy Holidays!” but “Merry Christmas!” you’d think this was about North Korea’s nuclear buttons.

Stop smirking. I know what’s on your mind. By taking this up, I am just as guilty am I not, wasting time and column space over this nitpicking: its like nitpicking over nitpicking. Maybe.

But it is time to call the b.s., as they say, to cut the cant. Because you see, this isn’t just about wasting our time and energy, it is also about the garbage that we throw every day in cyberspace, garbage that sadly can never be recycled much less reused.

If it were only about our time and energy, it wouldn’t really be an urgent public issue, would it. But all these nitpicking we do, all the wisecracks we think we dish out, add to the overload of useless and needless information that is clogging the information highway.

And an information overload in cyberspace is the last thing we need as we step up our engagement as a digital world. We rely more and more cyberspace as our information platform these days, and we need to keep it clean, free and reliable.

That begins with each of us for every netizen to be aware and responsible: we need to take care of cyberspace the way we need to take care of nature, of our environment. The bizarre weather patterns we are getting now as a result of how we have abused nature should serve as a warning about what could happen, not only to our physical world but also to the virtual planet should we refuse to own up to our responsibilities and take proper care of it.

While we have models for the terrible effects of climate change, such as the Ice Age and the cruelties it brought, we still do not know what an abused, over-used cyberspace can produce. Let us not assume  nothing will evolve out of the overload we stress cyberspace. As the wisemen said once, for every caue there will always be an effect. 

Since there is hardly any censorship or outside restraint to control  information flow there, it is up to us to make sure that what we upload there is useful and necessary – or, at the very least, worthy of the space it will eat up in the cyberspace.

This Merry-Christmas-not-Happy-Holidays issue at least does not immediately harm us. There are plenty of  tricks and pranks out there in cyberspace that not only add to the mounting garbage there, but even lead to confusion and pubic panic. There are  those death notices that are not true, for example. Or lies meant to destroy people. There are a million ways we are abusing cyberspace, the way we abuse the environment. I hate to think what wake up call is forthcoming.

Happy holidays, everyone!*

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