Blacks get all of February and most of January for all that matter as they fill the time from Kwanzaa at the end of December through Martin Luther King Day and the time leading up to Black History Month. Hispanics get most of October. Now even Asians, once considered the model minority for their former tendency to provide for themselves and not expect the rest of us to fill their outstretched hands, get their own month to wallow around in what they are. As usual, the White man gets forgotten in all of this as it becomes his duty to sit there quietly and simply nod in agreement as to what a wretched human being he is.
With a goodly portion of the year given over to ethnological naval-gazing and occidental denigration, one would think even the most fanatical mulitculturalists would grow weary of all this and find another way to entertain themselves over the weekend. But in Prince George’s County, Maryland in general and in the City of Hyattsville there in particular it seems the minds of liberals are so one track they can’t ever get too much of the same thing.
The weekend of July 10, 2004, the first annual Heritage Carnival of Prince George’s County will be held to celebrate “...the culturally diverse experience of African, African American, American Indian, Brazilian, Caribbean, Filipino, Italian American, and Latin American cultures. “ For supposedly being held for the purposes of, as Municipal Liaison for the County Obie Pickney told the Gazette, “...uniting Prince George’s County as ‘one people, one community’’ most Caucasian groups --- especially those of Northern European extraction --- are conspicuously missing from the list.
In order to be “one” as county propaganda urges, don’t you have to include Whites also? After all, though we might be fewer in number than we use to be, we all haven’t died off yet. Liberal racemongers will have to wait a while longer before they can celebrate our ultimate demise and finally forget about us all together.
The dogmaticians of diversity will respond that, if we are to enjoy an age of brotherhood and understanding, we can no longer look to race or ethnicity as a source of personal value and individual identification. If we are to ever be truly equal, we must think of ourselves as human beings only.
Why, then, are those who exploit such a sentiment the most organizing a festival where certain minor cultures are deemed more worthy of celebration and study than those from which the nation’s values, institutions, and way of life actually derive? Our children, as well as ourselves, would be much better off learning about the constitutional ideals of the Founding Fathers than about how some insignificant African tribe with a name hardly anyone can pronounce shakes their boody around the camp fire.
But then that’s probably the point about holding a celebration such as the Heritage Festival. By filling our minds with entertaining trivialities, those in power hope we won’t realize what’s going on and, even more importantly, what we might be able to do to correct the situation.
Those assembling around diversity as the highest principle of social organization don’t exactly muster the keenest argumentation in defense of their questionable cultural assumptions. For example, Prince George’s County Executive Jack Johnson writes in support of the Heritage Festival, “Our county’s population is the most diverse of any jurisdiction, and our greatest asset.”
An area or country is not great because of its alleged diversity but in spite of it. Isn’t greatness, as Martin Luther King whom professional racialists usually just about deify noted, determined not by the color of skin but by the content of character?
Aren’t race and color just accidents of birth and do little in determining what kind of person an individual will become? Both Walter Williams and Mumia Abu-Jamal are Black; but the first happens to be one of the wittiest social and political commentators of our day and the second a skuzzy-looking cop-killer convicted of murder.
Leftwing social engineers have conditioned the American people to applaud any minority conga line coming down the pike. Maybe it’s time we stepped back and examined such volkish posturing.
Suppose for a moment there was a population of pale-skinned redheads. Should we assume it is their redheadedness that endows them with their values and skills? Should we hold pale-skinned redheaded history month and convene pale-skinned, redhead festivals since in the past pale-skinned redheads weren’t appreciated as they should have been since most of us have heard of things denigrated by likening them to redheaded stepchildren?
Seems silly, doesn’t it? Then why do we put up with such silliness when Blacks or Hispanics are involved?
Even if you lack the courage to stand up for true American ideals in this age of radical tolerance, the spineless citizen can still oppose the Heritage Festival on purely economic grounds if they have not been fully communalized into thinking their tax dollars are better off in the hands of officials with no intentions of spending them frugally or wisely.
As of August 7, 2003 back when the Festival was planned for Sept. 26-28 but was called off as a result of a hurricane mercifully sent by Providence, the City of Hyattsville designated $12,000 to help defray Heritage Festival expenses. Though I can’t really say for sure if the City council eventually reneged its position in the year ensuing the Festival‘s September cancellation, such an outlay of revenue is foolish in light of the hoopla over the municipality’s looming budget crisis.
Though property tax rates are the same this year as last, that was not decided until there was a multi-session debate where members of the police and firefighters’ union paraded their sob stories before the public access cameras of the televised meetings lamenting how their pensions would go underfunded unless conscientious residents did the civic-minded thing by agreeing to higher property assessments. Maybe if the Council made their legitimate expenditures their top fiscal priority instead of surrendering other people’s money to trendy elitist causes just to show everyone how politically correct they are and how guilty they feel about being White people, maybe they’d have enough to properly reimburse those who actually do the city’s assigned tasks. Before you put the statutory gun to my head demanding I fork over more, make sure you’ve properly spent what I have already been forced to give you.
Neither diversity, nor its accompanying heavy-handed approach to social organization made American great. Rather that is a distinction that belongs to the individuals who realized that they couldn’t expect the group or government institutions to float their boats on the seas of life.
We should not trample the memory of such valiant pioneers by patronizing a festival designed to undermine our identity as Americans while robbing us of our financial resources in order to do so. Rather the spirit of hearty individualism should be honored by keeping government sponsored activities to a minimum thus allowing the productive to retain more of what’s theirs to begin with. That would be something we could all celebrate.
Copyright 2004 by Frederick B.Meekins
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