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In three letters to the editor author Jay Dubya describes how religious holidays in Americans public schools are part of the ongoing culture wars between traditionalists and revisionists. Revisionists Rewriting Halloween Tradition Now that Halloween has come and gone, I wish to describe what I believe is actually happening concerning Halloween on a national level that has had its repercussions right here in the Hammonton School System. Halloween has recently been changed from an annual school tradition to Black and Orange Day. Local school administrators have publicly stated that the conversion is due to safety reasons. How many incidents involving violence or student injury during past Halloween celebrations have happened in our public elementary schools? Ill bet few if none!
Certainly if safety is a major concern the elementary school kids could continue to enjoy their parade and celebration without wearing masks while parents could stay out of the school building and hear about the festivities over nightly supper. I suspect that other more sinister factors are at work here besides a concern for safety. First of all Halloween has much of its origin attributed to the medieval idea of ghosts of saints (spirits) populating the earth just prior to All Saints Day and All Souls Day in early November. To be a saint one has to obviously be dead so naturally Halloween (as we know it with ghouls and goblins) is an extension of that ancient belief in ghosts. Please remember that Halloween means Holy Eve. The essential problem of contemporary social revisionists (those in powerful positions attempting to rewrite American history and culture) is that (in their demented point of view) all references to Christian holidays in public schools must be eliminated to allow for the Separation of Church and State.
Our Founding Fathers thought that the Separation of Church and State meant to not have a State Religion in America dominating political thought such as the Anglican Church was doing in England. The Pilgrims and the Puritans migrated to America because they were being persecuted by the more elite and influential religious denominations in England. So to our Founding Fathers, the Separation of Church and State simply meant to not have a predominant religion influencing secular government decision-making. However modern revisionists have insidiously re-defined this revered historical notion of Separation of Church and State to meet their own fancy. Lets examine what has happened on the national scene that has been initiated and will be gradually completed by social revisionists. Christmas has been diminished to the Holiday Season in our public schools, Easter has become Spring Break and now Halloween has become Black and Orange Day.
When Martin Luther King Day was established as a national holiday on the January school calendar Washington and Lincoln had to be diminished in stature to accommodate MLK. February used to exclusively belong to George and to Abe but now we celebrate Presidents Day (seemingly to honor all Presidents) and February has suddenly magically appeared as Black History Month in our public schools. The next holidays to be hit in this diabolical domino effect will be St. Patricks Day becoming Green and White Day, St.
Valentines Day becoming Red Day and Thanksgiving becoming Grateful Day simply because all three of those remaining holidays have all-too-glaring Christian references and origins. Do you see a pattern here? In addition to history and cultural revision the phenomenon known as political correctness also is responsible for this sudden change in the traditional Halloween venue to the Fall Festival. When I was teaching eighth grade English in the late 1990 s I had been developing a creative writing activity while using excerpts from the movie Beetlejuice to show to several of my classes. A small faction of vociferous parents (for religious reasons) didnt want their children exposed to Ghosts in a public school setting and vehemently protested my creative writing lesson to school administrators. Their children had to go to the library to work on an alternative writing assignment while the movie was being shown in my classroom and school administrators advised me to not in the future show a film that certain elements of society find offensive.
And so if you honestly believe this standard company line business of Halloween being altered to Black and Orange Day because of safety concerns then you dont fully understand that the standard corporate line (Federal Department of Education and the State Department of Education) dictates guidelines to school administrators and that their decisions are also being influenced by powerful educational bureaucratic professors who are calling the shots in teachers colleges and universities. These radical educational and societal revisionists (who incidentally author your childs textbooks) are endeavoring to re-design U. S. history and re-define time-honored American traditions in order to reconstruct the past and the present for future generations to study. Their policies and agendas are advanced by their need for political correctness (dont offend anyone in the minority community by your time-honored national cultural traditions) and by their need to abolish Christianity and all of its vestiges from American society starting with the public schools, where vital socialization of the next generation is being practiced. If you believe that the elimination of the Halloween heritage in the local public school has to do with safety then you must be living in Oz instead of in Hammonton.
Safety has little to do with the transition the town of Hammonton is witnessing in regard to Halloween. The entire issue is politically motivated on both the national and the local levels. The transition from Halloween to Black and Orange Day is really all about political correctness and about the ongoing secular war on Christianity, its teachings and its symbols. John Wiessner Jay Dubya (authors initials) Letter to the Hammonton Gazette October 31, 2005 Here is another Letter to the Editor that was published in both the Hammonton News and the Hammonton Gazette on December 8, 2005 The theme of the letter is the transformation of the saying Merry Christmas in local public schools to the more politically correct Happy Holidays.
How Does the Hammonton School System Stand on Merry Christmas? Editor: Now that the Hammonton Elementary School primary grades have made a travesty out of changing the traditional Halloween parade and corresponding classroom decorations into Black and Orange Day and the celebration of Thanksgiving into Turkey Day the next cultural barrier the school administration must face is the elimination of Merry Christmas anywhere in the school buildings. Instead Happy Holidays, Winter Break and Holiday Trees must replace the mentioning of the taboo word Christmas. And you probably thought that the nefarious old Grinch was only a fabrication of Dr. Suesss fertile imagination. Powerful secularists and history revisionists are again rewriting the past, trying to make us all pretend that the Christmas tradition was never honored or celebrated in our public schools.
And your public school administrators are so influenced by these educational and cultural revisionists that the bureaucrats will wholeheartedly ignore the past and conveniently change the present (at your childs expense) in order to accommodate their politically correct superiors in the State and Federal Departments of Education. The United States of America, our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence were all founded on Christian values based on the principles that man is basically good and that mans nature can be trusted with unalienable rights. A rather grotesque convolution has been occurring in America the last sixty years where secularists and revisionists are using the First Ten Amendments of the U. S.
Constitution to undermine the teachings of the Old Testament Ten Commandments. Legality is currently at war with conventional morality and now Halloween and Christmas are at the core of the religion / law controversy. And when the secularists and revisionists are clever enough to figure out that the appellation Santa Claus is simply an Americanization of the European Saint Nicholas (Father Christmas), then old St. Nick will most definitely be under attack too this time of year because of obvious political / religious implications. This rising anti-Christian sentiment in this great nation really sleighs me. The biggest problem that the agenda-oriented secularists and revisionists face in regard to December 25 th is that not only is Christmas a religious holiday but it is also a declared national legal holiday established by President Ulysses S.
Grant in 1870. Hebrews and Jehovah Witnesses should not be offended with the nomenclature Merry Christmas because they share this nations rich Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments heritage. In fact eighty-five percent of Americans call themselves Christians and if the majority opinion rules in this democratic country, then the popular December holiday should be recognized in public schools despite the objections of Muslims, Buddhists, atheists and other offended vocal minorities. The secularists and revisionists argue that Happy Holidays is a more inclusive term than Merry Christmas is. Stores like Target, Wal Mart, K-Mart and Toys R Us dont want to discriminate against certain minority interest groups so they prefer to call the reason for the annual December shopping bonanza Happy Holidays while simultaneously banking on the theory that Christians will not be offended (by being snubbed) and will not boycott their stores.
We live in an age where militant minorities get their gears greased while the silent majority often suffers the consequences. Hopefully all of this detrimental cultural dismantling insanity is about to change. But in the past great civilizations have collapsed and crumbed from internal moral decay (and not from external conquest) because those entities lost their sense of purpose and identity. This butchering of Merry Christmas is evidence of the same destructive phenomenon occurring in America right before our very eyes. Secu...
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Research essay sample on American Public School Holiday Crisis
