CHCH News - Fear and Loathing in the Holiday Season

This last Sunday morning, I stuck my head in local family-oriented buffet-style eatery, seeking a breakfast both painless and substantial. This was one of a chain, which graces its walls with Norman Rockwell artwork and portrays itself as a holdover of “traditional” values. Not exactly my choice of ambience; but at this one outlet they offer excellent biscuits and gravy - something hard to find north of the Mason-Dixon.

Substantial, I got. Painless…well, something was amiss. It took me a few minutes to realize it, but once I did I couldn’t ignore it. Or stomach it.

Amidst this recreation of 1940s America; the spindle-back chairs and dark wallpaper and advertised specials drawing images of “Home for the Holidays,” was playing Musak. Seasonal Musak.

Not Christmas background music. But generic, bowdlerized, all-references-to-Christmas-removed, “Happy Holidays” Musak. No traditional lyrics or music - just something computer-generated to vaguely suggest the seasonal favorites.

It was too much. I left in a funk…has it come to this, that it’s not safe even for a restaurant that caters to Bible-Belters, to mention Christmas, when it’s Christmas?

This war on Christmas is old news, of course. The ACLU has been intentionally mistranslating Jefferson’s dictum, “Separation of Church and State,” almost as long as I’ve been old enough to appreciate such things. What’s new is the hysterical fanaticism with which they’re pushing this campaign.

Like so often with emerging trends, there are many forces in the background at work. Leftist sympathizers dominate both the schools and the government bureaucracy. The schools are staffed by political naives who are led like sheep by NEA, and governmental functionaries, likewise politically inert but represented – and increasingly driven – by government-employees’ unions.

The media, likewise under the sway of secular leftism, exacerbate the situation by presenting hysteria over the mention of Christ or Christmas as a reasonable position – instead of a censor’s bootheel in the effort to dismantle popular culture.

It’s obviously frustrating to the liberal movement. On the one hand, they’ve made such great progress – Political Correctness is essentially the law of the land; so many of the institutions of government are immersed in Leftist political culture; we “enjoyed” eight years of a President with demonstrable situational ethics. The younger Gen-X’ers are predictably confused and passive over mandated, cajoled, pressured moves to make God a dirty word in public spaces.

Yet in the midst of this, some conservatives are fighting back with the energy of a cornered animal. They’ve backed foursquare, a President who’s a mediocre Chief Executive but a genuinely moral man; this largely as a reaction to the nihilistic, morally-ambivalent Progressive opposition. They’ve started boycotts on “progressive” retailers who’ve barred Salvation Army bellringers, but have created “gay-friendly” policies and programs

And they’ve essentially drawn a line in the sand – this is how far you’ve taken it; you’ll go no farther. The Secular Humanists are finally, belatedly being told: Their right not to be “offended” by 2000-year-old cultural references to religious holidays – is itself offensive, to a vast majority of Americans.

But this explains little of the terror the two-millennium-old celebration of the birth of the Christ Child holds for Progressive Secularists. That answer lies in values…or lack thereof.

For openers, the entire need for a Savior, a redemption of sin – symbolic or by proxy or otherwise – is anathema to the Left. It speaks of inflexible standards of Right and Wrong, and a Higher Moral Authority – one which cannot be swayed with sophistry or deceived by distraction or confederates.

Rigid standards of morality deny the Left their right of situational ethics – the right to be “moral” not by behavior determined “good” but by “caring” about issues deemed important, by the celebratti culture.

In such a framework a person can remain “moral” while living in destructive, hurtful ways, and even breaking laws or actively harming others. For it’s his right to determine the morally-correct choice of the moment.

Laid out in stark terms like this, it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see the flaw in such thinking. It’s essentially moral anarchy.

Which of course leads to another pillar of the Left’s cultural Utopia. Legalism…an environment where values are determined by law, only by law. If something is good – seatbelt use, recycling, preventing others from smoking – than it can and MUST be stipulated by law.

Conversely, anything not spelled out by law – adultery, constraint of sexual behavior, consideration of the neighbors – must therefore be right, and can NOT be coerced by traditional, informal pressures.

Sex and pleasure draw special mention. For thirty years the Left has worked to portray sexual license, especially, as sophisticated and progressive. Restraint, commitment and consideration of consequences, were mocked as Dark Ages thinking.

If careful examination doesn’t put that postulation on its head, a review of thirty years of libertine living will does so. The human animal, is of course Id-driven; a natural seeker of pleasure. Only a reminder of duty, of the checks on behavior needed for the community survival, can work against that.

And only God, only recognition of a Higher Power or at least acceptance of the concept, can have the ability to force, not only others, but one’s self along the more difficult but more productive course.

The Left is having none of this. Spoiled in nearly two generations of license, pleasure-seeking and genitially preoccupied they will and do react as a bratty child will when told, NO!

Large groups within our population have become accustomed to the idea that we’re rich and powerful and that persons don’t need to exercise personal restraint – they need only to avoid being caught. Whether it’s unhygienic homosexual activity, raising children without benefit of marriage, using poorly-written law as a shield for embezzlement, or hiring a mistress on government funds set aside for an internship program…these people are to be admired, if they are able to avoid consequences

In such a climate, Government has replaced God. Government becomes a sort of godhead…a controllable, easily-deceived God whose right and wrong are determined by votes and focus-groups, and through who anyone can obtain salvation…using sophistry before twelve jurors.

The reaction of such people to the message of the Christ Child, that of forgiveness to a people whose greatest righteousness are as filthy rags…is terror. The terror of a three-pack-a-day smoker looking at the result of his choices on an X-Ray filmsheet.

It’s a reaction of rejection and denial and clinging to absurd hopes. It’s that of a child, hiding under the bedclothes, hoping the monster in the closet will just go away.

It’s a reaction that leads to contortion of law and logic. Which puts the “tolerant” progressives in the very-intolerant position of trying to stamp out the religion of the people – using the force of Government.

It’s the mindset of a nihilistic movement, which believes in nothing – no absolute values of right, wrong, or desirable – nothing except success by any means, which can be justified by the success.

In such a mindset, the advocates of license and legalism have elevated Jefferson’s comments to the Danbury Baptists, the famous quote of “Separation of Church and State” to the level of Law of the Land; while totally ignoring the Constitutional guarantee of “free exercise of religion.”

It’s more than a few loudmouths or legal agitators. It’s a systemic rot.

The proof is not so much the rejection of one faith or all faiths; but the attempt to use laws and guarantees OF free exercise of religion to STAMP OUT that same free exercise.

That it wasn’t enough for a faith-based culture to accept and accommodate a secular segment. That that secular subculture felt so threatened, so disturbed by the continued practice of the beliefs of others, that it felt it necessary to turn the law of the land on itself.

Where it will go is anyone’s guess. It needs to be addressed in the schools; legally in government; individually with our children.

But we can begin by challenging it, this movement of enforced secularism by self-appointed elites. Remember: We no longer need accommodate them in their increasing prickliness; we outnumber them - vastly.

Merry Christmas to each and all. May God bless us every one.

Chaffee, New York

December 22, 2004

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Engineman, sailorman, gravedigger, thief - JustPassinThru has been all of these and more. A former political-science student, a lifelong vagabond and a highly trained observer of the human condition, he now writes his misconceptions on the Web - while he searches for better-paying employment and waits to find out What The Deuce Is Next.

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