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December 11, 2004

Taking Offense

Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.

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We are Pagans. You'd think that, if anyone were going to be offended at very Christian celebration of Christmas - given that the date was chosen quite deliberately to take over from Yule - it would be us. But somehow we're not. Apparently, some people are, and communities and schools are caving with barely a peep muttered in protest in the first place. You'd think that we'd at least wait to see if a significant number of people are offended before we react, but apparently that's not the case. You'd think that we'd apply "live and let live" and not get offended by hearing a Christian song or seeing a nativity scene, but apparently we - or at least our public officials - have become so craven and gutless that they've forgotten how to tell people to get over themselves.

Look, it's very simple: society cannot work without tolerance. Stripping the ability of the most commonly-followed religion in the society to express itself in public in any way is not tolerance, but tyranny. (And the same goes for stripping any other religion, no matter how many or how few followers it has. And for that matter, for any other belief, ideology or lifestyle that does not harm others than the practitioners.) Human nature rebels against being forced into homogeneity, and eventually this manifests itself in all kinds of acting out. (In many ways, the 1960s was a rebellion against the manifest conformity of the 1950s, at least as perceived by the young people of the 1960s.)

But somehow we've forgotten how to get along with other people, whether because of schools that actively reject our core culture, or courts that have arrogated to themselves all authority, or people who are just too polite to tell idiots to stop being stupid and leave the rest of us alone. Regardless of why we've lost our way, though, we have an opportunity to fix it by being a little rude now, and liking ourselves and our culture, and maybe even being a little bit jingoistic and cheerleading for America and the West and our shared culture. Maybe, maybe we can save our culture and polity if we do. Otherwise, it's a fair bet that we'll simply continue on the divisive and bitter trend we've been on the past 40 years, to who knows what end.