MeDotOrg wrote:I don't think it's fair to say that the ONLY result of the exclusion of traditional holiday festivities is inclusiveness. I think this strikes to the very heart of something that is happening in American culture: The disintegration of old traditions without new ones. I'm not talking about 'equivalent' traditions that we simply think we can plug in.
One of the things I think we're losing in this country is our sense of group identity. It was a lot easier when the dominant white culture laid down a simpler cultural identity, but obviously it no longer works. But simply saying our new identity is inclusiveness begs the question: inclusiveness in what exactly?
I think a lot of people have given up on the idea of a shared American identity as being part of the American dream. The new vision of America seems to see our history as running away from the idea of government or any kind of social contract other than free enterprise or whatever ethnicity we currently inhabit. 300 million Americans sitting on their front porches with shotguns in their laps, saying "get off my land!"
What sense of interconnection and social values can we, as a diverse country of over 300 million people, share?
This is what I struggle with. I'm not convinced that excluding all traditions is inclusive. Maybe i'm naïve, but it seems to me that inclusiveness means including stuff. I think we could do some serious thinking about how to modify old traditions to make them inclusive. Yes, we're pretty diverse as a country, but I don't think that means we can't have some traditions that bind us together as Americans.
On my list of things that I wish the U.S. would do differently, the pledge is a fair ways down. I think the effect of reciting it every day in school is that kids memorize and recite it without thinking about it at all. Adults too. So I don't really lose any sleep worrying about whether my kids are being brainwashed. I'd like to see the "under God" come out because I don't think a statement of loyalty for my country should have anything to do with God. Also, I find the notion of "under God" as being at loggerheads with the next word: "indivisible." I find "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" a fine aspirational statement for a country. I think the extra words -- a relic of the cold war -- just muck it up.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
MeDotOrg wrote:I don't think it's fair to say that the ONLY result of the exclusion of traditional holiday festivities is inclusiveness. I think this strikes to the very heart of something that is happening in American culture: The disintegration of old traditions without new ones. I'm not talking about 'equivalent' traditions that we simply think we can plug in.
One of the things I think we're losing in this country is our sense of group identity. It was a lot easier when the dominant white culture laid down a simpler cultural identity, but obviously it no longer works. But simply saying our new identity is inclusiveness begs the question: inclusiveness in what exactly?
I think a lot of people have given up on the idea of a shared American identity as being part of the American dream. The new vision of America seems to see our history as running away from the idea of government or any kind of social contract other than free enterprise or whatever ethnicity we currently inhabit. 300 million Americans sitting on their front porches with shotguns in their laps, saying "get off my land!"
What sense of interconnection and social values can we, as a diverse country of over 300 million people, share?
This is what I struggle with. I'm not convinced that excluding all traditions is inclusive. Maybe i'm naïve, but it seems to me that inclusiveness means including stuff. I think we could do some serious thinking about how to modify old traditions to make them inclusive. Yes, we're pretty diverse as a country, but I don't think that means we can't have some traditions that bind us together as Americans.
On my list of things that I wish the U.S. would do differently, the pledge is a fair ways down. I think the effect of reciting it every day in school is that kids memorize and recite it without thinking about it at all. Adults too. So I don't really lose any sleep worrying about whether my kids are being brainwashed. I'd like to see the "under God" come out because I don't think a statement of loyalty for my country should have anything to do with God. Also, I find the notion of "under God" as being at loggerheads with the next word: "indivisible." I find "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" a fine aspirational statement for a country. I think the extra words -- a relic of the cold war -- just muck it up.
+1 to what both of you said!
No precept or claim is more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.”
― Harlan Ellison
And when the confederates saw Jackson standing fearless as a stone wall the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
Yay! Christmas is saved!! And America!!! Thanks, Uncle Santa!!!!!
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
The department of education told principal Eujin Jaela Kim that “Santa is considered a secular figure and is welcome.” The school can also show off “Christmas trees, menorahs, kinaras and star and crescents.”
It's nice to see that Breitbart is supporting (or at least not decrying) the inclusion of stars and crescents. It's like a little Christmas miracle.
People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people, Jeremy.- Super Hans
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.- H. L. Mencken
You know, the legal reasoning that keeps the Pledge being led by public schools is that it is a ceremony of no meaningful religious value. It's supposed to be as rote and religiously meaningless as saying God bless you after someone sneezes. This argument seems to be outright contradicted every time there is any whiff of the Pledge going down in a school and the religious right blow their collective top over it. If it has no religious intent or effect, why do they seem to so fervently think it does?