We need a lot of Christmas.

I heard a heartbreaking story the other day. That's not too uncommon around Christmas, when newspapers will publish such stories for fund-raising appeals. Or maybe it's just bad news in a family that seems particularly poignant because it strikes at Christmastime. Terry Teachout, writer on the arts for the Wall Street Journal and other outlets, provided one like that this year, and God bless him and his wife.

The story I heard was from an acquaintance whose female friend was in California for Christmas, in all likelihood to watch her grandchild die helplessly, while the baby's parents were off to score more drugs. The baby was born in a flop hotel and dumped at the hospital. The parents entered the wind.

My friend's girlfriend (seems an odd word for a woman with a grandchild) is doing what little she can, but it is very little. The child, born with all kinds of health problems, including opioid addiction and one dead kidney, is a ward of the state, and not likely to be released into Grandma's care even if he survives. The parents? Well, one presumes they are normal enough young people, or were before addiction got into them tooth and claw; now they are like a devil's own upside-down version of the Nativity, uncaring producers of an unwanted child doomed not to die for our sins, but just plain doomed to die without ever having lived.

California has become a magnet for this behavior, by refusing to enforce any kind of control on it. As if allowing this kind of thing to go on is some kind of mercy to the mentally disturbed, to the addicts and drunks, turning the streets into a fecal swamp. The big companies haven't run for the hills yet, but small businesses can't keep their doors open, surrounded by and victimized by this criminal activity. Failed nations allow this because they have no resources to control it; American cities and states are allowing it because they are run by the insane.

How is this any kind of kindness? Can anyone think that the mother will ever want to get straightened out with the knowledge of what she has done to her child? Addicts have one answer to feelings of guilt and shame (and in fact to everything else): pick up and use. Had the authorities enforced rules against vagrancy and drug use, the mother might have been confined someplace safe and drug-free, the baby born without so many health crises, and perhaps the mother and even the father would have had a moment of clarity to encourage the desire to get and stay clean. Now none of that is probably ever going to happen. The local government will bear the cost of disposing of the bodies, the one type of street garbage that it's still willing to haul, for now.

So yes, we need Christmas, and a lot more of it, and everything else that comes because of it. I said the other day that Hollywood doesn't understand love at all anymore, and this is true; but no one in California seems to understand justice and mercy, and that you can't have one without the other. The state is run by people who act like giving a baby hard candy because he wants it is the kind thing to do. When he chokes to death on it, well, their hearts were in the right place.

At least, as Selena Zito reminded us a couple of days ago, many and maybe most places in America are not this stupid or nutty. In her profile of the lovely little town of Everett, Pennsylvania, a place of generosity and civic spirit, she writes, "I think America is mostly this way. At least, America is more like Everett than it is like whatever you see on cable news. You just sometimes have to slow down to see it."

I think she's probably right about America. I just don't know how long it will last.