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Posted by curls2006 Promoted 305 days 19 hours ago 1900 views
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Politics / General Politics
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Each year more and more of Christmas disappears because non-Christians will be offended by it. Or will they?
Every year, around this time, an increasing number of stories concerning the impact of immigration on our traditional way of life begin populating the news. Did you know, more and more non-Christians come to our country displaying an alarming intolerance towards our religious festivals? Well, they do, apparently. Every year, those easily offended non-Christians team up with the PC Brigade and try to bloody-well ban Christmas!
Shocking, you say? I know! Unbelievable, you cry? Too bloody right!
With each annual wave of stories I would think, “Who do these non-Christians think they are? I don’t complain when they have their festivals, why should they complain when we have ours?”
My annoyance always went unheeded though, and the following year, the stories would re-emerge. Another Nativity play cancelled, another council refusing to put up Christmas lights, all because of these easily offended non-Christians.
Of course, they never dared complain to our faces, to air their displeasure to us personally, face to face. But the papers found out and made sure we heard about each and every instance. Ban Christmas indeed!
Until finally, it dawned on me: they don’t exist.
You see, no matter how hard I tried, I was never able to pin down one of these easily offended non-Christians (EONCs, from here on,) to tell them exactly how I felt about them and how they should leave our festival ruddy well alone. Everyone I confronted claimed that they were more than happy for Christmas to continue uninhibited and found the idea that someone would be offended by it ever so slightly silly. It must be some other non-Christians.
But my mission to find these EONCs continued to be fruitless. From town to town I encountered non-Christians who sent Christmas cards, put up Christmas trees, drank till they were merry and whose children got excited whenever the “big fat man” began making his annual appearances on telly promoting brown fizzy stuff. The closest I got to finding an elusive EONC was a few atheists who tried to convince me that it was “all a pagan festival anyway, you know.” They were all down the pub for Jesus’ birthday though, let me tell you.
Then, finally, just when my spirits were almost broken, I struck gold. During a conversation with one of my Hindu colleagues shortly after Diwali (the Hindu Festival of Light) I asked her how she felt about Christmas celebrations (quite tactlessly directing the questioning towards whether or not she wanted to stop them).
“Of course not,” came the reply.
Damn, I thought, disappointed that I was once again robbed of the confrontation I had craved for so many years.
“But,” she continued, “I do wish the council would spend some money on Diwali like they do on Christmas.”
Oh. It all became a little clearer then: when potential EONCs approach their council with a request for funding towards one of their faith festivals, the reply is often a resounding “No” followed by “We just don’t have the budget.”
“Great!” we might think, “More of the budget for us!” But these wily councils just won’t have it that way. Realising that they have been spending disproportionate amounts of taxpayer’s cash (collected by a non-discriminatory taxman from people of ALL faiths) on a Christian knees-up, they pretty quickly find they only have two (diplomatic) options: Fund every faith festival, or fund none. It doesn’t take a degree in economics to see what comes next.
And so each year, as more and more councils face what must be the cripplingly hard choice of “spend more or spend less”, we see more and more of our traditional Christmas resigned to history, to memories of how it used to be in years gone by.
And each year, accompanying these cut-backs are the media stories of easily offended non-Christians, the PC Brigade, and council chiefs who are so afraid of offending minorities that they will, so we are told, ban any outward display of Christianity. Especially displays that cost a bob or two of public money.
Of course, it’s all bunkum. Sometimes it’s bunkum generated from nothing more than a journalist’s lack of insight into the politics (and indeed, economics) of multiculturalism, other times it is generated from a desire to stir up racial tensions and a siege mentality. Undoubtedly there will also be some dithering old fools sitting on councils here and there who genuinely believe the hype and actually think someone somewhere will get offended if the Mall hosts a Santa’s Grotto this year instead of the newly proposed food court that just happens to occupy the same space (I know what you’re thinking – it’s Father Christmas,) but even when EONCs, or the apparent threat of them, fail to play a part in the “cancellation of Christmas” they inevitably get the blame.
So, next time you read in your local rag that Christmas is under siege from EONCs, look deeper into the politics and the economics behind it all, and if, after that, you still believe in EONCs, I challenge you this: go and find them. I couldn’t.
