A Holiday Thought Experiment

Tomorrow is a legal holiday in the United States with banks, stock exchanges, most offices of governments, and many schools closed. Everyone paying attention knows the holiday is in honor of Martin Luther King, and that is the legal designation of the holiday. However let us imagine that some people decide not to recognize that, preferring to speak   only of the “mid-January holidays” and making a point of it. Suppose further that most people in the traditional media and   timorous corporate executives go along with them and make that  term  their standard.

The stated reasons for the change would be concerns for sensitivity and inclusion.   Those pushing it would point out that there are other holidays in January  that some people celebrate such as Confederate Heroes Day and Elvis’s birthday. They would say they are worried that  people who do not celebrate MLK Day  might be made to feel “marginalized” by others mentioning of it. They would either indignantly reject claims they were antagonistic to MLK Day or laugh them  off as paranoid fretting by their political opponents.

Most people would not buy it. Instead they would assume that what they were seeing was prejudiced hostility, willful and hypocritical ignorance, or both. And they would be right to do so.

Now consider how people, mainly on the left, treat the legal holiday of Christmas  and the customs,  events, and shopping tied to it and ask whether similar conclusions are appropriate. I believe they are, and that  the leftists and their spokespeople in the traditional media have a problem with Christmas.  I do not agree with conservatives that it is based on hostility to Christianity, though that may be motivation for some people. Easter gets left  pretty much alone, and it is a far more Christian holiday than Christmas.  As I have written earlier, I think it is the merry rather than the Christmas that so many leftists cannot stand. Happy, self-sufficient people who are feeling benevolent and having a good time on their own with no supervision from authorities are not the sort of potential subjects would be masters want or need.