Lizzo said that she chose to cover this song “not just because it’s a classic, but because it’s a reminder to us that almost 60 years later, we are still fighting for peace, compassion, and equality”. Sometimes 1960s lyrics calling for peace and love feel a bit dated to me, a wish that seems too simple to overlay onto modern geopolitics. But I ought not to deride the wish; I write to you from Paris, where it snowed last night and we are having the opposite of a warm December, and war has people worried that it will get very dark and cold indeed.
Friends in North America have asked me about what the European energy crisis is like; I don’t know to what extent we’re having one, at least in France? People are definitely talking about it, but when I checked the electricity map just now, France was only using gas for 12% of its energy (62% was nuclear). Macron gave a typically testy interview last week where he rebukes public electricity companies, telling them to (pardon my translation):
Do their jobs and provide electricity… not start making people afraid with absurd scenarios like we’ve heard over the past few hours. Stop à tout ça ! We are a big country, with an excellent energy model, and we’ll hold on through the winter despite the war. And so I ask everyone to do their jobs.
But are scenarios of power cuts to Paris truly absurd, especially since some of France’s nuclear reactors are down? In November, I read articles on how “the future of Europe hinges on the weather”, how energy prices have increased by five times their precrisis levels and many electricity providers may need to be bailed out to avoid bankruptcy.
And, also, how absurd that two-hour power cuts are what I’ve chosen to read about, when the war in Ukraine might be the most deadly ongoing armed conflict in the world right now? (Wikipedia lists the 2022 fatalities as 34,600–189,275+, which overlaps the estimated 6,487–105,900 fatalities in the Ethiopian civil conflict. That’s… so many people, in both places, most of whom I’m sure deserved better.) Absurd to have the ability to focus on such inconveniences! Not to suggest the world’s ongoing wars have to eat all our attention, either; I’m partial to the C.S. Lewis sermon on Learning in Wartime, where he notes that:
Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun.
Anyway, uh… enjoy this Lizzo Christmas song! I feel like the one shining moment it describes is surely more than one prayer away from our world today, but I don’t want to be cynical about wishing for peace, and I hope we can enjoy beauty even though we are insecure.
Maybe just in time for you and me,
Tessa