Christmas in March

Tonight I was in a grocery store.

Christmas music was playing in the background: instrumental renditions of "Rudolph," "Oh, Holy Night," and other mundane songs that we have to put up with for several months during the dark days of Winter.  

Hearing about the Great Hallmark Holiday and mommy kissing Santa Claus on the Ides of March was a very, very disturbing experience for me. 

I'm one of those terribly polite people who virtually never complain to managers or any staff about the quality of their business.  I've been served cold meals, wrong meals, over-charged, under-charged, and many glasses of expired beer;   I keep my mouth shut, for I forgive human beings for making honest mistakes.  

But tonight I was so disturbed by hearing Christmas music in March that I complained to the manager of the grocery store, and to two other employees.  The manager knew something was wrong.  The two regular employees didn't even realize that Christmas music was playing in the background. 

Perhaps I was so disturbed because hearing the music confirmed my scornful hypothesis that Christmas is starting earlier and earlier every year, so that profit-driven people make more money off of our dumb-asses that buy into Hallmark Holidays.   

When I was a child, you couldn't really do Christmas until Thanksgiving was over.  And now, the trivial sales and the 4/4 key-of-C songs start virtually in October.   I've been saying for years, (partially tongue-in-cheek) that Christmas will soon start even sooner, and in a couple of decades, it will be year-round.  My experience tonight in the grocery store confirmed my idea that some would call a paranoid delusion.  It was like an experience similar to what George Orwell must have felt had he been magically supplanted into 1984.

As always, this blog post is not *really* about hearing Christmas music in March.  It's about a deeper sociocultural problem.  Shall we discuss this further below?  :)

The New Pope and Feminism

I've known a number of Catholics in my life.  

It always astonishes me to meet Catholics who are intelligent, educated, and modern, especially those of the female variety.

I pose to them a simple question:  Do you think men are superior to women?

I do not think this to be true, and usually they don't either.  We are all equal creatures under the eyes of God.

But wait… why can't women be priests?  Are they not prepared to receive God's holy knowledge?  

Why are testicles and a penis a prerequisite for knowing The Divine, and spreading The Divine to our human species? 

Among other things, The Catholic Church is completely sexist.  It is a relic of an old way of thinking and living, where women stayed home and made babies while men did more noble things.  

The media coverage of the newly "elected" Pope upsets me.  The day that a female Pope is elected is the day that Catholicism deserves to make the newspapers in a positive way.  

But that will never happen…

Is it not the time we take a strong stance against archaic, sexist, racist, and classist thinking in our culture?  Is it not the time we acknowledge how marvelous, miraculous, and special human life is, and abandon systems of thought, like Catholicism (and religion), that run contrary to this?   

Call me a liberal, a polemic, a hippy, an atheist, a Marxist, a feminist… for I embrace one label, and that is, a Humanist.  And I see the sexism, pedophilia, ethnocentrism, and corruption of the Catholic Church to be anti-humanist.  And I plead to you, my brothers and sisters, to stand up against such things.