It is maintained that a society is free only when dissenting minorities have room to throw their weight around ... As a matter of fact, a dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.--Eric Hoffer

I love Christmas and I always have. When I was a kid, the month or so leading up to Christmas was that one time of the year, without fail, when my mom glowed. Forgotten were the bill problems. Forgotten were her health problems. And forgotten were the three marital disasters which led to much of whatever else continually dragged her spirits down.

At the time, Christmas was for me a materialistic holiday as much as it was for any other dorky kid under the age of twelve or so. We took care of our Christian responsibilities. (You know, stuffing cash that we needed more than any church into church envelopes) We took care of some of our spiritual needs by sitting elbow-to-elbow Indian-style under the Christmas tree and belting out some songs from our smallish paperback Christmas hymnnals. Actually, this lady could have made it as a country singer. She did one mean Patsy Cline imitation if you ask me. And she could yodel with the best of 'em. We addressed our more basic needs by baking sheet after sheet after sheet of cookies that were only baked at this time of year. And Christmas was that one time of the year when step-dad himself would resist the overwhelming urges to launch fists at any step-kid who dared to move.

Most years, I knew that I would never actually recieve much of what comprised my lengthy Christmas wish list, but other than in 1967 when I obsessed over a new bike, the presents always seemed to come close enough when Suzie and I got down to shredding some innocent wrapping paper on Christmas morning. Matchboxes. G.I. Joes. Erector sets. Girder 'n' Panel sets. Tin-friction cars. Biology sets. Chemistry sets. Model rockets. All very good in my book back in the dark ages before micro-chips turned Christmas on it's head. Oh, yeah. And the Keds, the new socks, the new underwear and maybe even a new house coat, or a cumbersome new rain coat that glowed in the dark. It's Christmas, man. Ya gotta take the good as well as the bad.

One other ritual of my mom's was to pack into the Chevelle and make the trek up to Hartford to see the festival of lights in the downtown area. The City of Hartford, Connecticut used to decorate every single building and skyscraper with miles upon miles of white lights that could easily be seen from as far away as Alpha Mucktari. And my mom would painstakingly point out each and every Christmas display we happened to happen upon. Most of the more expensive and impressive displays were bought by and displayed by the various and sundry local governments and proudly displayed on property owned by said local governments. Boy, have times changed.

As far as I can tell, somewhere around 1969, some mentally defective malcontent and his "partner" discovered the phrase "separation of church and state" in an ancient letter somewhere, and then set about convincing the hordes of other equally mentally defective malcontents (future talk radio callers) that this phrase was culled from the Constitution of the United States itself. It took a while (as all subversive and destructive movements usually do) but with the passage of time and the repeating of that lie often enough, a growing minority of the folks that equate listening to Peter Jennings for 22 minutes five times a week with being informed came to know the big lie as being the truth.

Traditionalists be damned, this Christmas business on government property is offensive and can no longer be tolerated. Evidence of other religions on government property are hailed as signs of our growing tolerance, but our own Christian holiday must be struck from the conscienceness of all Americans from here on out. Twenty odd years from now, Christmas will be our only holiday celebrated in our closets. The constitution mandates as much, right? This separation of church and state argument is a thinly-veiled attempt to separate Christians from as much of their faith as possible, and little else. It's the leading edge of the Separation of Church and American-born Humankind as far as I'm concerned. And as the mentally defective and their publicly-funded whores at the ACLU continue to encroach upon our unalienable rights, I'm beginning to get mad as my future home, and I'm not gonna take it anymore.

The way I see it, if plastic figurines neatly displayed in a manger on public property somehow offends you, I'm here to tell you that the public education system and your parents have failed you miserably. But, alas, there seems to be no shortage of complete dimwits offended by something or other every forty seconds. If you own it, it is sure to offend one of the dimwits. And if you proudly display it, it will offend scores of them. If you think it, it'll surely set off alarm bells if you speak it. And if you worship it and it happens to be of a Judeo-Christian slant, you are more offensive than you'll ever know. The dummies among us have been conditioned to think that whatever makes America uniquely American is somehow offensive to a more liberated thinker, and therefore, must be removed from sight. Despite the fact that the great majority of the populace still yearns for those traditional things we've all come to expect.

And this "I'm offended" mentally, this "victim think" has gotten so out of hand, I can barely tolerate being anywhere near this non-stop stupidity invariably thought to be enlightened thought.

Teen-aged girls getting abortions without their parent's consent doesn't offend the new traditionalists, but a Baby Jesus statuette does. Pre-teens studying condom use in our schools goes unnoticed, but the Ten Commandments displayed anywhere near a courthouse shine like a beacon to the folks steeped so proudly in mental incontinence. Boy Scouts shouldn't be believers in God, but they should open their arms and other orifices to the Nambla crowd. Kwannza, (spelling?) some new-fangled holiday invented thirty-five years ago on a college campus is now the darling of the press, while the simple utterance of the words "Under God" in public makes the skin crawl for too many of us. Our very existance offends many on the Muslim side of the aisle, but we're told to learn more about their faith while relegating ours to the recycle bin? Let's talk offensive, shall we?

I can't help but to think that if people would spend less time trying to be offended by something, anything, they'd be much happier with their dismal existance, as would the rest of us. But no, no, the perpetually offended, the willy-nilly purveyors of victimhood just can't turn it off already. Every day presents yet another chance to be offended by something. My famous F-bomb laced T-shirts. Your open beliefs. His words. Her website. And gram's ceramic manger scene she donated to the local borough. Sorry, man. But in the whirling vortex where my scrambled thoughts are barely processed, this is little more than stupidity run amok.

We're five days away from Christmas here, kiddies. This ain't the Holiday Season, and no one is going to convince me to call my fake Christmas tree a Holly tree, a Kwannza tree, or a Poindexter-has-two-freakin-daddies tree. It's a freakin' Christmas tree and come Friday, wifey is gonna be pounding away on the block foundation with some traditional Christmas songs, many of which celebrate the life and times and such of one Jesus Christ. If that somehow offends anyone purporting to be smarter than the rest of us, drop me an electronic pulse and I'll send along a how-to suicide phamphlet to the lot of them. Or have em' stand directly under the mistletoe and land a big one on em'. A real big one. And not a kiss, mind you.

If the perpetually offended could only know how completely offensive they are, they'd sure as hell have their obvious shortcomings psychoanalyzed in an effort to figure out how WE managed to make them so utterly offensive. Such is the nature of the confused and offended pansy-beast. It's not them that has so many frayed wires crossed. It's the rest of us.

As for me, I'd just assume beat the friggin' snot out of them until being offended was no longer a possibility for them, but I'd rather not have to kill my cellmate for trying to do to me what the offended folks are so completely enamered with these days.

We've really gotta stop encouraging these mostly useless pricks. And it'd sure help a heaping ton if the folks in the print business would free themselves of their politically correct handcuffs. If some offended loonjob made a complete spectacle of himself in front of the courthouse to protest a manger scene, the press would report it the only way they're allowed to-they'd treat the guy as if he were a functional, rational human being. We'd all know better, of course, but the press cannot work to suppress the tide of 'separation of what annoys some from others' due to their politically correct shackles. They'd realize the guy was whacked-out by years of inattentiveness to meaningful detail, or being a completely jaded Philthydumpia Eagles fan. They'd know he needed a real hobby such as collecting colored pipe cleaners, or really, really nifty buttons in a padded white room. They'd make fun of him behind his back when he was busy citing chapter and verse about the fictional separation of church and state bullspit being in the constitution for the WNEP video babe. But when they'd go to print, the loonjob would be portrayed as being a brave crusader. A man with a plan. A man who knows (?) his rights and demands satisfaction.

Meanwhile, back at the smartly decorated Christmas ranches, we'd all be giggling to ourselves about what a scary loonjob this asshole obviously is. And yet, the neswpaper folks just can't understand why their subscriptions just keep on dwindling no matter how many new throw-away fluff sections they add to their daily editions. Maybe it has something to do with their credibility, heyna? If the guy is a loose cannon with way too much time on his hands, why tell us he's something other than the obvious? Is it any wonder that folks read on the internet for hours and hours every day while skimming through the local newspapers in all of three minutes? Rightly or wrongly, at least the folks typing away on the internet will call a spade a spade. The print folks won't go near any of that. In their rapidly failing world, a president of deep religious beliefs is a despicable cuss worthy of hateful contempt, but an unmistakeable anti-religious loonjob is a hero above reproach. Maybe every newspaper should hire one wild-eyed, notorious internet blogger to proof-read their predictably spineless bullspit before rushing to print with it.

That'd work, heyna? Picture me working at the Voice.

Mark, what do you think of the VISION! story?

What f**king bilge, man! Promoting awareness about homelessness only encourages homelessness. Don't you dumb chucks understand even that much? Funkin' A, man. Scratch that sh*t and write it up as a story about how effing homeless shelters and such are a needless cottage industry dependant upon federal and state grants. And tell that Vince that his grotesque comb-over makes me wanna headbutt the frickin' TV screen. Do you dumb-asses have any beers socked away here anywhere? What's that receptionists name? No! No! The one with the titanic mammalian protruberances? Ah, nevermind. I just knew I shoulda joined the freakin' Marines.

Obviously I'm feeling the Christmas spirit here. Or not?

Whatever, man. No one will ever accuse me of being a red state bible-thumper. I never attend mass unless someone ups and dies on us. And I never attend mass when anyone of note gets married, simply because overly-opinionated, unbending sumbitches tend to rub people the wrong way and get dropped from the list of prospective invitees. And that suits me just fine.

I did my share of pew time as a kid, and I can't say I liked it too much. It was always too hot in there, and way too boring. But oddly, when those rare occasions do present themselves that force me to don a suit and wander into a church, I feel as if I'm returning to the scene of an on-going crime thirty years in the making. I always feel as if I've let my mom and grandmom down for not making their faith, their church, as big a part of my life as it was in theirs. I try to console myself by reminding myself that I've tried to live my life by the Christian values they held so near and dear to their hearts. Yet somehow, as soon as I step foot in a church, I always find myself instantly re-visiting the crazy period of loud guitars, strip volleyball, Suck Uno and the 4,177 consecutive days spent tapping kegs. Despite having had turned my back on all of this Christian stuff to some degree, it still works just fine. The guilt. The sin. The feeling unworthy. It's still there.

And if I could, I might just trade any future Christmas' for one more shot at caroling under the Christmas tree elbow-to-elbow with my glowing mom. Barring some breakthrough combining nuclear technology, stem cell research and Marty McFly's sidekick, that's probably not going to happen and it's just as well. At present, we've got three little ones that need to have some Christmas traditions made into memories that will stay with them and wifey and I are more than up to the task that lies ahead.

And if anyone feels that any aspect of Christmas is somehow offensive based on whatever fictional, or anecdotal evidence they may cite; I'm here to tell them that they were cheated by never having known my mom, or spending even a single Christmas season with her.

If having faith is deemed to be too offensive for the ignoramuses protesting among us, and if the government should discourage such a thing at all costs; then praying to Santa Claus is all that remains for the perpetually offended.

Have a happy, God-less holiday season.

And enjoy your secular humanism no matter how empty it makes you feel.

There's no place like federal court for the holidays!

Later