The Corporate War on Christmas

[ck4829]

Go around and point out how much Corporations USE and MANIPULATE Christmas to make THEIR profits a little bigger.

Let's push the RW to address the ACTUAL Corporate Manipulation of Christmas.

Who's in?

[ClassWarrior]

1. ~raising my hand high~

:hi: I'm in!!

NGU.

[antigone382]

2. Here's a rant I wrote on my blog earlier today...

(apologies to SammyBlue for using your story without your permission--it was sort of a spur of the moment thing...I also hope that you don't mind my describing you as a friend :))

:rant:

Has Everybody Gone Insane with this Christmas Thing?

So this guy I know was doing some shopping today, and when he came out there was a Salvation Army bell-ringer looking for donations. Being a nice, charitable guy, he threw five dollars in the bucket. The bell-ringer said "Merry Christmas." My friend is Jewish--he was wearing a Star of David cross at the time, making this obvious--so he naturally replied with "Happy Chanukah." Evidently, this upset the bell-ringer guy, who responded, "It's Christmas, you asshole, not whatever holiday YOU want to be celebrating!"

I see this angry, almost paranoid desire to defend Christmas from the insidious evil-doers all over, these days; on TV and the radio, in the newspapers...and these last couple of days, I log on here and all my friends are writing blogs about the evil political correctness police who are ruining Christmas for everybody. What the hell? Did I accidentally step across some vortex into an alternate "Christmas with the Kranks" reality where Bill O'Reilly (or should I say Dild O'Reilly?) is going to come stand on my lawn and scream at me unless I put up a wreath? What IS it with people getting so militant about a HOLIDAY? I mean, I'm sorry if you don't like it, but a lot of different religions have holidays at the end of the year, and you're just going to have to DEAL with it that they aren't all yours.

But hey, here's a bombshell for you all: I'll agree with you...maybe Christmas *is* under attack...but here's a little secret: it isn't the Jews or the Atheists or the Gays who are out to hijack it--it's the greedy. The weapons against Christmas are not words or phrases or pictures of Santa Claus; they're gas guzzling Lexuses in big red bows, they're that nice new $50 sweater made for fifteen cents an hour by some twelve-year-old girl living on rice and beans in Malaysia, they're the blood diamonds on your wife's pretty fingers that cost some African boy his hand.

And you want to know who the true victims of this "war on Christmas" are? They aren't fat white women driving SUV's full of meaningless plastic crap to stick under their pre-lit trees, who are upset because some Dodge commercial said "Happy Holidays." It's every dying baby in Memphis--and God knows how many other American cities with third-world infant mortality rates. It's every black kid whose dad is in prison for marijuana possession, instead of in college, because affirmitive action is "racist," but racial profiling is A-OK. It's every family from New Orleans who lost someone they loved in the week after Hurricane Katrina because Michael Brown was more concerned with making sure his outfits looked good on TV than he was with rescuing people from one of the most catastrophic disasters ever to hit American soil--someone who won't be with them for Christmas ever again, all because of laziness and greed.

You want to know who the true Christians are? They aren't Jerry Falwell or Bill O'Reilly or Tim LaHaye--fat white men who fatten their wallets by stoking the fires of hatred in Christ's name. The true Christians are people like Jimmy Carter, people like Martin Luther King, Jr.; people who remember that Jesus's friends were not the priests, the pharisees, or the politicians--but the whores, the lepers, and the tax-collectors; people who undestand that Christianity doesn't give you the right to be judgmental and self-righteous towards the downtrodden and oppressed, but rather the responsibility to be merciful and compassionate towards them; people who fight greed and brutality and inequality at every step, because they understand that you can't separate Jesus from social and economic justice. These are the truly persecuted and ridiculed ones, the Christians who are all too rare in modern America.

If you're concerned that Christmas is being hijacked and corrupted, do something about it. Go out and feed a homeless person, if you want to save Christmas. Go protest for all those families who will have an empty place at the fireside this year because their loved ones were lost in a pointless bloodbath overseas, if you want to save Christmas. Go demand fair wages for everyone, so that we can all actually have something to celebrate, and be able to afford it, if you want to save Christmas. After you do all those things and come face to face with what real injustice is, if you still feel like writing a letter to some corporation so that they'll use the proper holiday greeting, be my guest. But until then, you've got no room to complain in my book.