PC Nuts Attack Thanksgiving in California

The politically correct fruitcakes are attempting to ruin Thanksgiving for the kindergarten students of two Claremont, California schools. The two schools said that it will suspend the tradition of having their students dress-up as Pilgrims and Indians during an joint event celebrating the holiday. For over four decades, the two schools have come together while one school dressed as Indians and the other as Pilgrims. Now, a few in the loudmouth minority have muscled the two schools into discontinuing the tradition.

This has sparked a huge controversy in this once quiet small town. People are divided in between those who want traditional Thanksgiving depictions and those who want Thanksgiving to have no visual references to the original guests at the Thanksgiving dinner. They feel that the way that Native Americans are dressed is a racial stereotype that must be averted. Now, I don't believe that modern day Native Americans shouldn't be represented in such a way. I don't know any that still dress like that, but the historically accurate portrayals of Indians from the first traditional Thanksgiving didn't wear a t-shirt and jeans. They wore moccasins, feathers, and other stereotypical dress.

"It's demeaning," Michelle Raheja, the mother of a kindergartner at Condit Elementary School, wrote to her daughter's teacher. "I'm sure you can appreciate the inappropriateness of asking children to dress up like slaves (and kind slave masters), or Jews (and friendly Nazis), or members of any other racial minority group who has struggled in our nation's history."

She is greatly misrepresenting the dynamic of the traditional first Thanksgiving. (The actual first Thanksgiving was in Virginia not Plymouth Rock three years earlier.) Comparing the pilgrims to slave masters or Nazis is like comparing Ghandi or Martin Luther King to Osama Bin Ladin. They don't portray Lieutenant George Custer dining with Squanto. The Pilgrims were a very peaceful people. There is not one account of them mistreating the Indians or trying to eradicate them.

Raheja, who is of Native American descent, went on to call dressing up like Native Americans of that era racist stereotypes. Is dressing up like Squanto or Pochahontas racist? No. She feels that it demeans her as a stereotypical Native American, but there are others who disagree with her. Kathleen Lucas, a parent of Choctaw heritage, said that her son was proud to wear the clothes of his ancestors.

Many people cower to the politically minority because they have the biggest and loudest mouths. Most of Americans don't want to secularize the holidays or become so uptight with all the land mines we have to evade in the PC culture that is so prevelant today. People wouldn't dare to disagree with them because of the fear of being called racist, sexist, or just plain mean and hateful. I'm personally tired of a few knuckleheads telling me what to do or wear because they think that they are better.

Dressing up in the historically accurate dress for the Indians at the time is not racist. It might be racist to have modern day Native Americans portrayed in that way, but not in a historical reenactment. Where does this insanity that is political correctedness end? Will Shakespeare's "Caesar" have to be played by men in three piece suits, so we do not offend Italians by having them dress in togas and sandals? The insanity must come to an end.