Dear Santa Claus,
I know I'm pretty early to ask you for a gift already, but if I start now maybe you can organize yourself better.
What I want this year for Christmas are not the usual things: an end to war, hunger and poverty. Those are ailments treatable by man, with a little good will.
No, what I am asking of you is much simpler: make every landline or mobile phone, computer and television suddenly stop working on Christmas day.
I'm not talking about the mobile phones of people who are far away and need to hear each other because they can't see each other, touch each other.
I am talking about those who are close and have stopped looking at each other to stay attached to an electronic device, without feelings. I'm talking about those people who do not look at the sky because they no longer leave their room, too busy with the keys
of a PC or the engaging sound of TV.
I'm talking about those who when they are together with friends, girlfriend, husband, relatives, children cannot detach themselves from that damned phone and lose the best moments of life: those that last a second and then pass.
Because life is an eternal Present and whoever wastes it on a small or large screen loses the infinitesimal joys, the little lights that make a soul brighter: a laugh from the heart, a look in love, the sunset that falls on the water. or among the burnished leaves of a tree in autumn, a caress, a kiss, the breath of the wind, the voice of silence.
It can happen to everyone to read a message on the mobile phone, when you are with someone else, but dear Santa Claus there are people who do not detach from that mobile phone for a second: you can forget your car keys, house keys, your wallet, the scarf, the umbrella. Head too! But the cell phone, no. That is never forgotten.
It is like an additional limb that keeps us connected with the world and on the world.
Except where we are at that moment. And with the people we are with.
See dear Santa, how much can electronics do? This is why I ask you to make sure that this year, at Christmas, people find themselves in front of a cell phone, a PC, a TV completely dead.
Maybe so they will begin to look up at the people next to them and notice how many beautiful little things had escaped from their eyes because "they never noticed", because they hadn't paid attention.
Maybe this way people will leave the house and start chatting with each other, rather than with a cold screen.
If you do this dear Santa Claus, maybe this year we will live one less day of electronics and one more day of Light.
Thank you.
Margoth Escobar was at a friend’s birthday party in the town of Puyo in the Ecuadorian Amazon last September when a neighbour called to say her house was on fire. The blaze destroyed her home and more than $50,000 worth of artisanry that she and other women planned to sell over Christmas. The local fire department said it was an act of arson against Escobar, who belongs to Mujeres Amazonicas, a collective of mostly indigenous women who have banded together to defend their land and the environment against oil extraction and mining. It was one of several alarming attacks against members of the collective in Ecuador last year, amid a broader trend of threats, smear campaigns and physical violence against women human rights defenders across South America. Putting aside her distrust of Ecuador’s police and justice system, Escobar filed a criminal complaint at the regional Attorney General’s Office in October. She has not been granted protective measures, despite the risk her activism brings and the attack already suffered.
