Social Responsibility and the Christmas Message
Social responsibility is, at its heart, the Christmas message. It is not confined to Christianity; the vast majority of the world’s religions recognize and promote it in some form. We return to this idea every year, reaffirming it through story, tradition, and moral teaching. Yet repetition alone has not preserved it.
This is not simply a matter of morality or ethics. Social responsibility is a stabilizing force. It protects societies from eventual collapse by ensuring that all members have the basic means to survive and, ideally, to thrive. History bears this out. Two world wars — the first, the last gasp of collapsing empires, the second, their final consequence — should have taught us that sustained exploitation by the few ultimately produces chaos. When responsibility is abandoned in favour of unchecked individual gain, the social fabric tears.
Few cultural works articulate this truth more clearly than Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Though separated by a century and shaped by different crises, both insist on the same principle: how one individual acts reverberates outward, shaping the lives of many. If a society is to be safe, prosperous, and humane, caring for others cannot be optional.
In It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey embodies social responsibility not as ideology but as daily practice. His sacrifices are personal, cumulative, and deeply human. He does not set out to be virtuous; he simply responds to need. Only when shown what the world would look like without him does George understand the collective weight of his choices. The film’s message is unmistakable: communities survive because ordinary people accept responsibility for one another, often without recognition.
A Christmas Caroloffers the counterexample. Ebenezer Scrooge rejects social responsibility outright, cloaking selfishness in economic rationalism and personal freedom. Dickens exposes this worldview as not merely cold but socially destructive. Scrooge’s transformation is not about charity alone; it is about reintegration. Redemption comes when he accepts that prosperity without responsibility is moral failure.
The danger, then, is not ignorance of this lesson, but our growing willingness to reject it. This is evident in how readily social responsibility is dismissed — and even vilified — particularly in contemporary American political culture, with troubling echoes appearing in Canada. The idea that caring for the vulnerable is somehow un-Christian, or a threat to freedom, represents a profound distortion of both religious teaching and civic responsibility. Selfishness is recast as individualism; neglect is defended as liberty. In truth, this message is fundamentally anti-social.
One of the most successful lies of the modern era is the claim that protecting the most vulnerable — from abuse, violence, exploitation, and preventable suffering — diminishes freedom. This distortion appears repeatedly in public policy debates: opposition to universal healthcare, resistance to vaccination, hostility toward socialized services, and the normalization of profit drawn from pain and suffering. The tolerance of hateful and violent speech is framed as freedom, yet such tolerance erodes the conditions that make a free, fair, and just society possible.
Exploitation is once again on the rise. The disparity between rich and poor in Western society has not been this severe since the early years of the last century. In an interconnected world, the interference of ultra-wealthy elites in the politics of other nations is increasingly visible — and increasingly questioned. Even within their own societies, many are beginning to recognize that they are not, in fact, safer, freer, or better off.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is that we now live in a profoundly interconnected world. This interconnection has the power to illuminate injustice, expose exploitation, and remind us of our shared humanity. Yet it can just as easily be used to spread the very lies that enslave us — narratives that corrupt the meaning of freedom and hollow out the message of social responsibility. Falsehood now travels faster than truth, amplified by profit, outrage, and fear. In such a landscape, neglect is no longer passive; it is curated, monetized, and normalized.
Dickens understood this. Capra understood it too. Their stories endure because they tell us something uncomfortable but essential: all of us are responsible for one another. The well-being of the individual is inseparable from the well-being of the community. If we want a world that is safe, humane, and prosperous, then caring for everyone in it is not a sacrifice — it is a necessity.
Everyday Stories of Ordinary People
What inspires me to write are the everyday stories of ordinary people. I’m drawn to the quiet moments when someone chooses, under pressure, to live by their principles—whether or not I share those principles today. I’m moved by courage that defends family, community, or nation; by resilience that stands up after a hard fall; by small decisions that ripple into history. These are the sparks that light my pages.
I don’t write to preach. I write to understand. How did people respond to world events and private heartbreak? What choices felt possible to them in that time and place? What did it cost to act—or to stay silent? I believe the past has something to teach us about the here and now, not because our ancestors were perfect, but because their struggles mirror our own.
After seven decades, I consider myself a rather simple, even conventional person. That simplicity keeps me honest. It nudges me to ask plain questions: Who is missing from this scene? Whose version of events haven’t I heard? What would it take for a reader unlike me to feel seen here? Inclusive storytelling, for me, begins with curiosity and continues with care—listening before writing, holding space for contradiction, and resisting the urge to flatten complex people into tidy heroes or villains.
I try to honour belief without endorsing harm, to show conviction without erasing doubt, and to acknowledge the limits of my own viewpoint. When I write characters whose experiences differ from mine, I research, I consult, and I revise. The goal isn’t to be flawless; it’s to be responsible and generous—to invite many readers in, not gatekeep who belongs on the page.
In the end, I’m inspired by people who keep going: the worker who starts again after a loss, the neighbour who steps forward in a crisis, the parent who chooses hope for their child. Their stories matter because they help us practise courage. They remind us that dignity can be ordinary and extraordinary at once.
If my work offers any meaning, I hope it’s this: we’re all part of the ongoing human story. By listening widely and writing with care, we can recognize ourselves in one another—and carry a little more grace into the world.
CANADIAN STORIES MATTER
Landscape Moulds its People
I first grasped the country’s vastness from the back seat of a white Ford Fairlane, travelling from CFB Kingston to my father’s final posting at Jericho Beach in Vancouver. In July 1963, we embarked on a two‑month odyssey, skirting the north shore of the Great Lakes—Kingston to Sudbury, then along the rock‑rimmed sweep of Lake Superior toward Thunder Bay.
Sudbury’s Giant Nickel and its stark, blackened hills—so bleak then, so green now—left me awestruck. My dad loved an early start, hustling us from motel beds while we were still in our pyjamas so he could steal a few miles before breakfast.
Just after dawn one morning we rolled past a weather‑beaten sign that read Welcome to Manitoba. A lone deer stood beside it, steam rising from its back as mist curled off the land in the soft, mystical light. I had never seen a deer outside a picture book; in that instant, I knew we were truly on an adventure.
From Winnipeg, the Prairies unspooled for an entire day—heat shimmering off asphalt, wheat fields flat as a table, with a blue sky that curved like a dome from horizon to horizon. By nightfall, we reached Calgary, lingered for the Stampede, then drove north to Edmonton for a two-week visit with family.
Turning back toward the mountains, we climbed rolling foothills until Jasper’s granite spires lifted us into another world: mountain‑goat herds balanced on ledges, elk grazing in roadside meadows, moose munching treats from tourists. One youngster even tried to clamber into our back seat for a piece of bread while Dad shouted for us not to feed the wildlife.
Leaving the Rockies, we slid into the desert valleys cradled between them and the Selkirks—sage‑scented, sun-burned hills where vineyards clung to brown slopes and vast green irrigation circles baffled my nine-year-old mind. Soon the highway plunged into the Coastal Range, hugging canyon walls high above rivers that thundered far below. Forests deepened, darkened, and wept rain. We slowed our pace to wander through waist-high ferns and picnic beside broad, pebble-strewn riverbanks.
Descending once more along the Fraser’s winding course, we entered the zone where mountains exhale salt‑tinged air and announce the sea. At last, we threaded the emerald garden valley toward Vancouver, the city where the peaks rest their feet in the Pacific.
I’m an old woman now, yet that cross-country journey is seared into my imagination. Each shift in landscape felt like turning a fresh page in Canada’s story. I’ve long believed that land molds the people who live upon it, and that conviction anchors my writing—especially in The Magpie’s Tales – Origins. Whether it’s the prairie’s fierce light and lingering twilight—where brutal winters give way to summers that blister the earth—or the cedar‑shadowed, rain‑soaked coast where secrets vanish without a trace, every landscape moulds its people, and those people, in turn, forge the legends of their land. I’ve been chasing that truth ever since.
