Every yuletide we hear the question asked from department store speakers “Do you hear what I hear?” in Bing Crosby’s soothing voice. If we know enough of the lyrics, recognize that it is a song describing the birth of Jesus Christ. But so many of us do not remember the circumstances of the song’s creation.
The music was written in October of 1962 and was performed by Gloria Shayne Baker and Noel Regney. They had been hesitant to write anything for Christmas due to the rampant commercialization of that holiday, repugnant as such greed is to the holiday's spirit.
October 1962 was also a time when the two great superpowers of this earth stared each other down on the sunny island of Cuba over the missiles which it hosted, aimed at Washington, and their counterparts in Turkey, aimed at Moscow. During that time, the specter of nuclear hellfire was neither an idle fantasy nor a paranoid hypothetical that populated letters to editorial staffs and niche magazines.
No, the possibility of the extinction of the human species was a terrifyingly real prospect as American and Soviet leadership attempted to work out a peace that would save both the United States and the Soviet Union, and indeed all humanity— for a nuclear war would have meant the destruction of our international civilization. The song's timeless words, "a star, a star dancing in the night with a tail as big as a kite," when put in that light, are eerily reminiscent of the last thing the innocent would see when a missile ends its sojourn to New York or Leningrad.
In the day of Baker and Regney, it was Cuba. In our day, it is North Korea. We, like those of 1962, are now standing on the precipice between existence and nonexistence.
True, the North Koreans cannot threaten the United States in the way the Soviet Union once could, but a war over Korea would still be a humanitarian catastrophe, whether it has a strike on the US or not. Likewise, with tensions between the United States and Russia, and our shared military intervention in Syria, there is likewise the possibility to let the world bask in nuclear hellfire.
In this unstable international system, one perhaps even less stable than that of 1962, does the command “pray for peace, people, everywhere!” not resound? Is that not a sentiment that rings true even today? Regney wrote of baby Jesus shivering in the cold, knowledge of which is sent to a king. Religious significance aside, is that not a metaphor for not one child, but for all our children? Of the vulnerable, of the fleeing, of the refugee, of the young and innocent who have done nothing to deserve the potential of imminent obliteration?
And shall our kings and presidents in their “palace walls” listen to that cry? I can only hope they would. They had the sense to do so in 1962. In 2017, we can only hope that our leaders will think that clearly. And in this yuletide season, when we hear Baker and Regney’s wonderful song on the department store PA, we keep its message of peace in mind.