Today is Easter Sunday. Whether you are into the religious significance or not, it is a long celebrated holiday by a large number of people on the planet. The Eggs and bunny thing is certainly a feature of the modern holiday and a noted aspect throughout Europe for centuries, with or without Jesus. So why did Google, the most invasive Internet presence on the entire planet, decide to use their Google ‘Doodle’ to celebrate…the birth of Cesar Chavez?
Don’t they know about Easter?
Chavez founded the Farm workers union, promoted socialist union power, advocated for Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines–a despot, was anti-immigration (OMG!), but is still highly regarded throughout parts of the country as a Latino leader deserving of veneration.
According to Wikipedia Cesar Chavez day…
…is celebrated in California, Colorado, and Texas as a state holiday, intended to promote service to the community in honor of Chavez’s life and work. Many, but not all, state government offices, community colleges, and libraries are closed. Many public schools in the state are also closed. Texas also recognizes the day, and it is an optional holiday in Arizona and Colorado. Although it is not a federal holiday, President Barack Obama proclaimed March 31 as “Cesar Chavez Day” in the United States, with Americans being urged to “observe this day with appropriate service, community, and educational programs to honor César Chávez’s enduring legacy”.
And it is celebrted at Google.
It occurs to me that the Googleistas could have at least clung to the pagan, nature-worshipping past that (more than likely) predominates their earth-friendly corporate plantation. The goddess Eostre or any of its various forms or derivations comes complete with all the traditional hey-its-spring-rebirth-fertility festival features a paganistic Gaia-hugging-left-leaning-global-warming-fearing bunch of one-percenters could hope for.
Why not Doodle a doe-eyed picture of Sandra Fluke surrounded by condoms, presenting handfuls of egg shaped RU-486? Nothing says “fertility festival” like defending a woman’s “right” to taxpayer funded fertility prevention. Or how about Lena Dunham doing….whatever it is she does that is not X-rated? Would that be nothing?
Cesar Chavez? Really? Although….
Maybe we need Car-Insurance maven Flo to announce to us that “Now That’s Progressive!
Perhaps the folks at Google have discovered what most of the anti-Christian zealots, practicing agnostics, and the atheists (including the angry, and agnostic atheists) have failed to realize? That bashing Christians with claims of having used a historical type-over to abscond pre-existing cultural celebrations was (a) that the celebrations they claim Christian Easter replaced were , in fact, “religious” ceremonies in their own right and that Christianity was just the modernization of the human mind in regard to its understanding of the human relationship to the creator or (b) that this is exactly what the anti-Christian zealots, practicing agnostics and the atheists (including the angry, and agnostic atheists) are doing to Easter now.
The new modern type-over movement is, however, more like a broad brush effort to white out the supernatural component altogether. While the science-worshipping, amoral, cultural humanists will call that progress (even though it is an idea that has been around for longer than all of us), even scientists understand that nature abhors any vacuum. Human beings, being products of nature and natures God, who deny the need to fill that spiritual vacuum with a desire to be better than their own nature, inevitably fill it with things that lead them in the other direction. People of faith, and even casual observers of human history, understand that those “things” often lead us further away from a desire to do good because good itself becomes an abstract concept with no meaning. Good and evil become subjective.
Once good and evil have become subjective evil simply takes over with or without our permission because being evil is easy; being good requires a morality grounded in something other than the moving target of the capricious desires of fast-talking salesman-turned into benevolent dictators that promise you impossible things in exchange for your adoration. Being good demands faith to a set of principles, a moral code we know we are not good enough to achieve but that encourages us to keep trying because the alternative is social and cultural anarchy, misery, poverty, suffering, and even death.
Yes, Christian Easter is a form of the fertility festivals of old. It takes place in spring. It coincides with pre-existing fertility festivals of eld. It is about rebirth. But it is not just about the rebirth of the world from the icy hand of winter. It is not just about the animals mating, or the beginning of a new growing season. It is about aspiring to the kind of selfless acts (every day of our lives) that without some guidance, human beings may find themselves incapable. Jesus died for our sins. Whether you care to believe in it historically, mythologically, paganistically, or spiritually matters very little if you cannot then wrap your mind around the transcendent nature, the very idea of resurrection.
We are all sinners. We are all prone to evil. It is the nature of flesh given free will. If there is no check on our nature, no thing worth looking up to, nothing to achieve greater than ourselves, we become trapped in a perpetual winter. We die inside.
But we can all be saved, right here, right now. It is not an easy road. We have to choose to walk that path. Every day we walk it we must struggle against human nature.
We will stumble, perhaps every day. And we must–every day–choose to get back up; to learn why we fall; to become spiritual athletes who, like any professional, learn to fall less often, learn to fall less hard, but still understand that falling is part of who we are and that only through faith and practice can we strive to imitate a state of living and being greater than the limitations of our physical being.
Critics like to point to people of faith who stumble. They like to use that as proof that it is all a sham. But it is easy to criticize when you are unwilling to even try. What’s the saying…you are guaranteed to miss 100% of the shots you never take. Evil is easy. Being good is hard.
We have to decide that there is good and evil in the world, that there is good and evil inside each of us, but that we have been given free will to decide for ourselves how to live our lives and we can choose. But that good is better. Good is better for us, our families, our communities, our states, and our Nations. And that if we do not stand up for good evil will prevail.
This is true of people, of cultures, of governments. All things have a desire to move downhill. This is why resurrection (and Easter) has such a strong metaphorical application for the living. Every day we rise from bed the world presents to us the opportunity to choose. We can choose spiritual and cultural entropy. We can choose to watch as society consumes itself in its passions of the mind and the flesh. We can choose to take from others, even to let others do the taking for us, so that we may remain at rest and let it all slip by, taking us with it. Or we can choose to push for higher ground.
Over at Google, on the day we celebrate the renewal and salvation of the flesh as ressurection, it is Cesar Chavez Day.
Not to worry. I’m sure Google will pick up the slack on Lenin’s Birthday.
Happy Easter.
