- Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found
time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing
in a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient
roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families
put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark
of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national
Christmas tree on the White House lawn.
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- Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes
from the wise men or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When
I was a kid, gifts were more modest than they are now, but even then people
were complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown
accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone
of many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take
time from our harried lives to give them thought.
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- The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our
connections to a Christian culture that has held Western civilization
together for 2,000 years.
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- In our culture the individual counts. This permits an
individual person to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle,
to become a reformer and to take on injustice.
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- This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western
civilization. It has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to
all other citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of
law and free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries
of struggle, but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the
individual's soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so
elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.
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- Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western
civilization people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a
sense of justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform,
investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial enterprises,
new products and new occupations.
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- The result was a land of opportunity. The United States
attracted immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their
own lives. Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.
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- In recent decades we have begun losing sight of the historic
achievement that empowered the individual. The religious, legal and political
roots of this great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high
schools, colleges and universities. The voices that reach us through the
millennia and connect us to our culture are being silenced by "political
correctness." Prayer has been driven from schools and Christian religious
symbols from public life. Diversity is becoming the consuming value and
is dismantling the culture.
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- There is plenty of room for cultural diversity in the
world, but not within a single country. A Tower of Babel has no culture.
A person cannot be a Christian one day, a pagan the next and a Muslim
the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and religious values provides
no basis for law except the raw power of the pre-Christian past.
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- All Americans have
a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are individually believers
in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine that has curbed
power and protected the weak. Power is the horse ridden by evil. In the
20th century the horse was ridden hard. One hundred million people were
exterminated by National Socialists in Germany and by Soviet and Chinese
communists simply because they were members of a race or class that had
been demonized by intellectuals and political authority.
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- Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing
traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin
made this clear when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as "unlimited
power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything."
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- Christianity's emphasis on the worth of the individual
makes such power as Lenin claimed unthinkable. Be we religious or be we
not, our celebration of Christ's birthday celebrates a religion that made
us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion
as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.
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- December 25, 2007
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- Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] wrote the Kemp-Roth
bill and was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.
He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and
Contributing Editor of National Review. He is author or coauthor of eight
books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press).
He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon
Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution,
Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals
and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the
U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor.
He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert
Mundell. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He is
also coauthor with Karen Araujo of Chile: Dos Visiones La Era Allende-Pinochet
(Santiago: Universidad Andres Bello, 2000).
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- Copyright © 2007 Creators Syndicate
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