All we want for Christmas is often something we can't get. World peace? Poverty eradication? That would make Santa sweat like a North Pole pig. No more violence, no more discrimination, no more settlements in the West Bank, no more brutality against the Rohingya, no more extremism, no more torture, no more drone attacks, no more school shootings, no more global warming, no more deportation of migrant workers, no more censorship, no more floods, earthquakes, tsunamis - wish for those and we're going to sound like John "Imagine" Lennon with flowers in his hair, though I believe Lennon was often right in general and wrong in some particulars.
Let's hope for less, then: less traffic, less pollution, less political malice, less injustice, less hot Decembers, less stupidity (mine and yours), less hypocrisy (yours and mine), and less Gangnam Style. But truly, with a hand on my trembling heart, after months of woes and shock, what I really do wish to see less and less of is a couple of things, and it will require much more than portly Santa and his red-nosed pals to deliver them.
Above all, if not world peace, I wish for less southern unrest. Christmas or not, right now we're risking the trap of numbness and insensitivity about the South, just like what we feel about, say, the news from Palestine over the past 60 years. Throughout the year the nearly daily killings have produced headlines and alarm, and yet the ubiquity and stagnant narrative have created a sort of mental distance between here and there, between the possibility of genuine distress and the daze caused by repetition and statistics.
On Thursday, militants were suspected of an arson attack on a government building in Narathiwat, and last week's shootings of teachers were as atrocious as anything in recent memory. "Not again!", we cry, and then what?
Too bad that fixing the southern discomfort doesn't qualify as a "populist policy", as if the problem wasn't about a significant part of the population - otherwise the government would've dedicated time and effort to it. Solving or not solving this won't affect the PM's year-end popularity poll, because even the public don't really place it high on the checklist. That the southern mess - which involves the issues of violence, injustice, double standards and sovereign authorities - exists beyond both the red and yellow agendas exposes the ideological hollowness of both colours. If they're so much against injustice as they claim, that's where injustice of every kind takes place every day.
Someone must move the narrative forward. In my humble view, the authorities have to go beyond the superficial horror of news headlines and day-to-day ambushes into something else, and they can do that by, firstly, making it clear which eminent minister is responsible for the problem, because PM Yingluck's mantra of buranakarn, "integration", sounds more and more like a bad parody of Gangnam Style, and secondly, it's time to throw in big ideas - radical ideas, like a degree of self-autonomy, for instance - besides the day-to-day defence against the insurgents. Only big, structural ideas can shake the public from its torpor and put the southern agenda back in the national consciousness again.
Santa can't help the PM with that.
Likewise, Father Ho-ho-ho will ponder hard what to put in Abhisit Vejjajiva's sock. The former PM is now facing a murder charge - a move that should set a precedent, as it's about time we believed that someone has to be responsible when people get killed. But is it that simple? In a way, this is an Ahab-vs-Moby Dick monomania - beginning with the obsessive hatred of Thaksin Shinawatra, and now, to return the favour, the consuming enmity against the former PM in charge of the May 19 crackdown.
What eludes me is how everybody tiptoes around the issue of the trigger-puller. No one wants to upset the military. No matter how many charges are thrown against Mr Abhisit, who was responsible in some ways, it's too bad no one wants to ruffle the army's feathers.
And that brings us back to the southern question: if a murder charge can be brought against Mr Abhisit, what about Tak Bai, Krue Sue, and a few thousand murders down there, by the separatists and the authorities? By delving into the mud of the southern chaos, the military will certainly be caught in the net, and that's too risky for the politicians. That means the triumphalism in the case against Mr Abhisit is undeserved when justice remains amiss elsewhere.
All we want for Christmas, like I said, will never come true.
Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.