Airports are not pretty. But one October afternoon Hamilton airport was for me for a moment a place of beauty.

A young man with the moonish face of intellectual disability waited impassively alongside an elderly woman for a traveller to arrive. He was a reminder of human sadness, the unfairness of chance.

Then his face disappeared into a big, round smile. The person he waited for came into view, then into his hug.

Unfair chance became a huge warmth, an instant of hope, a Christmas story 10 weeks premature.

The message of Christmas is often a "no", a Christianity of what must not be done, the wrongness of humanness. And there is much that is wrong.

The good news of Christmas is a "yes", a Christianity of what can humanly be done, the rightness of humanness. There is much that is right.

The wrong is so big that it questions the very notion of "civilisation".

Greens are mistaken to insist we must act now to save the planet. The planet will be here long after humans have run our ephemeral course.

The right green message is to act to save humans from our uncivil instincts.

At the macro level there is the evil of Muslims who revel and die in the slaughter of innocents. Mumbai is the latest large example. No god which mounts such missions can be good.

There is the tyrant of Zimbabwe whose self-glorification demands his captive people starve and die of disease. There is in 2000s Congo a reminder of the 1990s Rwanda genocide across the border.

And lest Europeans slip into the sin of superiority, the 1990s in the Balkans were a reminder of their two great tribal wars and mass killings of the 20th century, the great pogrom against the Jews, the starving and killing of tens of millions in Russia, replicated later in China and then Cambodia.

We are a step away always from barbarity, even in the freest societies. A departing United States President approved torture. Can the new President expunge that obscenity from his once free, now paranoid, nation?

In this society, at the micro level, there is the Rotorua man who maltreated a toddler whom his two sons in turn tortured to death. What did he do to his sons? What did his father do to him?

They were an item in a long menu of humanity's inhumanity served in our courts and in our salivating media this year. It is a horrific litany of the scarcely imaginable.