May 1, 2006

        Before we begin, let's get one thing straight: Just because a group is pink or brown or speaks Portuguese or Latin or believes in Buddha or Vishnu doesn't make them any better or worse than any other group. Doesn't make them any better, either. I still get tickled when so-called African-Americans say that they can't be racists. Right. Swine rinds come from pelicans, too.

        So, on this 1st of May, when pretty maidens should be pretending to be virgins and dance around may poles in the ageless paean to pagan gods of fertility, what we have is different bunches of sweaty people, all out marching for various purposes (or porpoises, if you're the group from PETA/ALF/ELF/RALF)

        Oh, I know, it's supposed to be serious business with each group's agenda as the most important thing since the Resurrection. The fact is, though, that each group from the New Black Panther Party (oomgowah, no showah!), to the Undocumented Immigrants Party (take a break, impress a chicken!), to the Minute Men (build de fence, build defence), to the Buy French Movement (run away, run away!), is practicing a freedom they can't get anywhere else.

        Not in France, not in Germany, surely not in Russia or Mexico, not in Canada, not even in England, can a nation tolerate the kind of freedom of speech and habeas corpus that we have in the United States (in Mejico, that two U's and Two E's, or "Greater Mexico")

        And that, in a kernel, is that. The people who want to be stupid, get to be stupid here. We are kinder to the stranger in our midst (especially in South Carolina, historically) that even the Old Testament command requires. (And if you don't think the separatist New Black Panther Party isn't strange, then you need a laxative and a vacation.) The stranger they are, the more we seem to like 'em.

        You might wonder where the crazy idea to tolerate all these different points of view came from? Well, it's not a European idea. It's not an English idea or even an American Protestant idea. It's an Episcopalian idea. Or at least, an early Scottish Episcopalian idea. The Scots knew what it was like to have the crap beaten out of them, especially by their own Presbyterian friends. They LEARNED to tolerate even the silly ideas that grew up among them.

        But what they never did was allow stupid ideas to dominate them (well there was that one time when they sold all their land to the English, but they're getting over that little stupidity.) This is what is happening in American today. In some of those silly marches, today, there were people who even waved Communist party flags. (just red). As if people have not learned, graphically, from the likes of the Kh'mer Rouge, and the Soviet Union, that socialism and it's theological equivalent, communism, don't work; they are like little puppets dancing from the fingers of richer morons in foreign states protesting the very country's principles that proved them wrong.

        It stinks.

        So we have a new holiday. International Break Your Country's Laws and Labor Day. Stinko de Mayo!

Dick Anderson