In the Under-5 Set, White Becoming the Minority

I have read, that right now in the Forced Union, 8 and under are majority non-White.  Gee this one is easy to walk out.  WHITES do not have unlimited TIME!!!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/06/AR2008080603683.html?hpid=topnews

In the Under-5 Set, Minority Becoming the

Majority

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 7, 2008; B01

A surge in Hispanic immigration over the past decade has dramatically altered the racial and ethnic composition of the region’s youngest residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures released today.

As with minorities in general, immigrants tend to be younger than non-Hispanic whites and still in their childbearing years. As a result, in five suburban Washington counties, more than half of children age 4 and younger were minorities when the annual Census Bureau survey was taken a year ago.

In three of the counties — Prince William, Montgomery and Charles — the share reached about 60 percent. And in Prince George’s, where Hispanic immigration has supplemented an even larger African American population, more than 90 percent of these children are minorities.

The implications for governments and communities are wide-ranging, demographers said. As the current crop of youngsters reaches kindergarten age, school systems that would otherwise be losing students will continue to grow or remain stable. They will also need to accommodate an ever-larger number of students who were raised in immigrant households where English was not spoken.

In addition, although most Hispanic children younger than 5 are native-born U.S. citizens and therefore eligible for government health care and other benefits, research indicates that if their parents are not U.S. citizens, they will be less likely to claim assistance, said Michael Fix, director of studies at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.

“All of this really reinforces the importance for counties to increase their investment in early childhood development now,” Fix said .“If you don’t make that investment, one of the penalties you pay down the line is that you have kids in school who don’t speak English well and whose overall performance lags behind.”

Fix pointed to studies indicating that as many as 75 percent of elementary school children learning English as a second language were born in the United States.

“Even more worrisome is that over half of the English-as-a-second-language learners in high school were native born,” Fix added.

As these minority children mature, counties that until fairly recently were dominated by non-Hispanic whites are likely to shift to majority-minority status, said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.

“The bubbling up [of minorities] that we’re now seeing at the younger ages will continue to move up through the age range, through the teenage years, the working-age years and then the housing-buying years,” he said. “The child population is really a microcosm of the future.”

Minorities had already grown to 47 percent of the population in Charles and 48 percent in Prince William in July 2007, up from about one-third in 2000. Montgomery, at 46 percent minority, is also getting close.

Demographers cautioned, however, that the extreme ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of area minorities makes it difficult to make broad predictions about the impact of the region’s impending shift to majority-minority status.

In Prince George’s, for instance, 62 percent of children younger than 5 are non-Hispanic blacks, and they include a substantial share born to affluent families.

Similarly, in Fairfax County, Asian children account for 17 percent of those younger than 5. Often born to upwardly mobile immigrant professionals who encourage them to supplement regular schoolwork with additional classes, Asian students are disproportionately represented among the county’s top-performing students. And last month it was announced that for the first time Asian Americans will outnumber whites at the county’s most prestigious public magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

Nor can Hispanic immigrants, who hail from a wide range of nations, be easily categorized.

“You cannot necessarily predict that just because they’ll become majority-minority, all these schools will become low-income,” Fix said. “The Washington area has one of the most diverse foreign populations in the nation.”

Adding to the complexity of the picture is that the Census Bureau collected its data through July 2007, before the current economic downturn and before Prince William and other counties adopted initiatives against illegal immigration.

In Prince William, the percentage of students enrolled in classes for English as a second language dropped nearly 5 percent from a record of 13,404 in September to 12,775 by the end of the school year. The impact of the downturn and immigration restrictions will be reflected in Census Bureau data to be released next year

A Great Christian hero has gone to be with Jesus Christ!

Live Not By Lies

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

As printed in The Washington Post, p. A26
Monday, February 18, 1974

Following is the full text of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Live Not By Lies.” It is perhaps the last thing he wrote on his native soil [before the collapse of the Soviet Union] and circulated among Moscow’s intellectuals [at that time]. The essay is dated Feb. 12, the day that secret police broke into his apartment and arrested him. The next day he was exiled to West Germany.

At one time we dared not even to whisper. Now we write and read samizdat, and sometimes when we gather in the smoking room at the Science Institute we complain frankly to one another: What kind of tricks are they playing on us, and where are they dragging us? gratuitous boasting of cosmic achievements while there is poverty and destruction at home. Propping up remote, uncivilized regimes. Fanning up civil war. And we recklessly fostered Mao Tse-tung at our expense– and it will be we who are sent to war against him, and will have to go. Is there any way out? And they put on trial anybody they want and they put sane people in asylums–always they, and we are powerless.

Things have almost reached rock bottom. A universal spiritual death has already touched us all, and physical death will soon flare up and consume us both and our children–but as before we still smile in a cowardly way and mumble without tounges tied. But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength?

We have been so hopelessly dehumanized that for today’s modest ration of food we are willing to abandon all our principles, our souls, and all the efforts of our predecessors and all opportunities for our descendants–but just don’t disturb our fragile existence. We lack staunchness, pride and enthusiasm. We don’t even fear universal nuclear death, and we don’t fear a third world war. We have already taken refuge in the crevices. We just fear acts of civil courage.

We fear only to lag behind the herd and to take a step alone-and suddenly find ourselves without white bread, without heating gas and without a Moscow registration.

We have been indoctrinated in political courses, and in just the same way was fostered the idea to live comfortably, and all will be well for the rest of our lives. You can’t escape your environment and social conditions. Everyday life defines consciousness. What does it have to do with us? We can’t do anything about it?

But we can–everything. But we lie to ourselves for assurance. And it is not they who are to blame for everything-we ourselves, only we. One can object: But actually toy can think anything you like. Gags have been stuffed into our mouths. Nobody wants to listen to us and nobody asks us. How can we force them to listen? It is impossible to change their minds.

It would be natural to vote them out of office-but there are not elections in our country. In the West people know about strikes and protest demonstrations-but we are too oppressed, and it is a horrible prospect for us: How can one suddenly renounce a job and take to the streets? Yet the other fatal paths probed during the past century by our bitter Russian history are, nevertheless, not for us, and truly we don’t need them.

Now that the axes have done their work, when everything which was sown has sprouted anew, we can see that the young and presumptuous people who thought they would make out country just and happy through terror, bloody rebellion and civil war were themselves misled. No thanks, fathers of education! Now we know that infamous methods breed infamous results. Let our hands be clean!

The circle–is it closed? And is there really no way out? And is there only one thing left for us to do, to wait without taking action? Maybe something will happen by itself? It will never happen as long as we daily acknowledge, extol, and strengthen–and do not sever ourselves from–the most perceptible of its aspects: Lies.

When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: “I am violence. Run away, make way for me–I will crush you.” But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally–since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies–all loyalty lies in that.

And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.

This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us, but the most devastating for the lies. Because when people renounce lies it simply cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism.

We do not exhort ourselves. We have not sufficiently matured to march into the squares and shout the truth our loud or to express aloud what we think. It’s not necessary.

It’s dangerous. But let us refuse to say that which we do not think.

This is our path, the easiest and most accessible one, which takes into account out inherent cowardice, already well rooted. And it is much easier–it’s dangerous even to say this–than the sort of civil disobedience which Gandhi advocated.

Our path is to talk away fro the gangrenous boundary. If we did not paste together the dead bones and scales of ideology, if we did not sew together the rotting rags, we would be astonished how quickly the lies would be rendered helpless and subside.

That which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world.

So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood–of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one’s family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies–or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one’s children and contemporaries.

And from that day onward he:

• Will not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth.
• Will utter such a phrase neither in private conversation not in the presence of many people, neither on his own behalf not at the prompting of someone else, either in the role of agitator, teacher, educator, not in a theatrical role.
• Will not depict, foster or broadcast a single idea which he can only see is false or a distortion of the truth whether it be in painting, sculpture, photography, technical science, or music.
• Will not cite out of context, either orally or written, a single quotation so as to please someone, to feather his own nest, to achieve success in his work, if he does not share completely the idea which is quoted, or if it does not accurately reflect the matter at issue.
• Will not allow himself to be compelled to attend demonstrations or meetings if they are contrary to his desire or will, will neither take into hand not raise into the air a poster or slogan which he does not completely accept.
• Will not raise his hand to vote for a proposal with which he does not sincerely sympathize, will vote neither openly nor secretly for a person whom he considers unworthy or of doubtful abilities.
• Will not allow himself to be dragged to a meeting where there can be expected a forced or distorted discussion of a question.
• Will immediately talk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda.
• Will not subscribe to or buy a newspaper or magazine in which information is distorted and primary facts are concealed.

Of course we have not listed all of the possible and necessary deviations from falsehood. But a person who purifies himself will easily distinguish other instances with his purified outlook.

No, it will not be the same for everybody at first. Some, at first, will lose their jobs. For young people who want to live with truth, this will, in the beginning, complicate their young lives very much, because the required recitations are stuffed with lies, and it is necessary to make a choice.

But there are no loopholes for anybody who wants to be honest. On any given day any one of us will be confronted with at least one of the above-mentioned choices even in the most secure of the technical sciences. Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence or toward spiritual servitude.

And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul- don’t let him be proud of his “progressive” views,a dn don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a merited figure, or a general–let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and warm.

Even this path, which is the most modest of all paths of resistance, will not be easy for us. But it is much easier than self-immolation or a hunger strike: The flames will not envelope your body, your eyeballs, will not burst from the heat, and brown bread and clean water will always be available to your family.

A great people of Europe, the Czhechoslovaks, whom we betrayed and deceived: Haven’t they shown us how a vulnerable breast can stand up even against tanks if there is a worthy heart within it?

You say it will not be easy? But it will be easiest of all possible resources. It will not be an easy choice for a body, but it is only one for a soul. Not, it is not an easy path. But there are already people, even dozens of them, who over the years have maintained all these points and live by the truth.

So you will not be the first to take this path, but will join those who have already taken it. This path will be easier and shorter for all of us if we take it by mutual efforts and in close rank. If there are thousands of us, they will not be able to do anything with us. If there are tens of thousands of us, then we would not even recognize our country.

If we are too frightened, then we should stop complaining that someone is suffocating us. We ourselves are doing it. let us then bow down even more, let us wail, and out brothers the biologists will help to bring nearer the day when they are able to read our thoughts are worthless and hopeless.

And if we get cold feet, even taking this step, then we are worthless and hopeless, and the scorn of Pushkin should be directed to us:

“Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom?

“Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash.”

---

©1974 Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Digitized and formatted in HTML by The Augustine Club at Columbia University, 2001

www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/

augustine@columbia.edu

Last update: August 5, 2001

1) “If you touch our women, we’ll kill you,” and 2) “We will not be ruled by Negroes.”

This is a must read from Cambria Will Not Yield!

“I am recommending that we step outside of the democratic parameters, which were parameters constructed by white, technocratic, anti-European bureaucrats, and return to the heroic mode of the antique Europeans. In that mode, political systems were a means to an end and not the end itself.”

Thomas Nelson Page’s, The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem, is a must read also (www.pointsouth.com)

http://cambriawillnotyield.blogspot.com/

Cambria Will Not Yield

Friday, August 01, 2008

If Ye Break Faith

In the modern world all the authors from the past have fallen into neglect. But even before the great denial of everything European, one very great author had already been thrown on to the trash heap. That author is Thomas Nelson Page. He certainly deserved a place in American letters alongside of Melville and Hawthorne and above such pygmy’s as Twain, Faulkner, and Anderson. But he was Southern and he was Christian (1), a combination that was most distasteful to the self-anointed arbiters of literary greatness.

Page’s work will endure among true Europeans because he writes about the permanent things. He was consciously archaic because he rejected the Godless wisdom of the wizards of science and progress and remained true to the values of old Europe, which he saw embodied in the institutions of the old South. In the closing chapter of his novel Red Rock, Page expresses his rejection of modernity, a rejection that he held to throughout his literary career.

In the old stories, the climax used to be considered attained when the young couple became engaged. Like the hero and heroine of the fairy tales of our youth, in that golden land of “Once-upon-a-time,” all that was to be told after they became engaged was that “they married and lived happily ever after.” In the modern stories, however, this seems to be but the beginning of new adventures. Marriage, which used to be the entrance to bliss unending, appears to be now but the “gate of the hundred sorrows;” and the hero and heroine wed only to find that they loved someone else better, and pine to be disunited. They spend the rest of their lives trying to get unmarried. Nothing is so unconventional as to love one’s own husband or wife, and nothing so tame as to live pure and true to one’s vows in spirit as well as in fact.

It must be said, at once, that this is not a story of that kind. The people described in it knew nothing of that sort of existence. Any reader who chooses to go farther in this history must do so with the full knowledge that such is the case, and that the married life of the young couples will be found as archaic and pure as that of our first parents, before modern wisdom discovered that the serpent was more than the devil, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil more than a tree of knowledge.

Page wrote poetry, novels, short stories, history and books for children. There is always something to be gleaned from an author like Page. He is one of the many giants that the late nineteenth century produced. Staring at the brave new world of the twentieth century, they bid the European go deeper rather than cosmic.

In Red Rock, Page writes about the men and women of the South immediately following the Civil War. If we compare their resistance to the forces of modernity – science, capitalism, Negro-worship, and Christ-less Christianity – to our own resistance, we can see how far we have fallen and where we need to go.

The South after the War was a European, Kinist society. Quite probably the Southern European nation was the most European nation on the face of the earth. Defeated in battle, they won, for a time, the “peace.” There were a number of components that allowed the South to defeat the forces of modernity:

• They did not regard man-made law as superior to God’s law.
  When the carpetbaggers’ law conflicted with the code of chivalry, the Southern men defied it. In Red Rock, the Southern man told their new governors that they had two rules: 1) “If you touch our women, we’ll kill you,” and 2) “We will not be ruled by Negroes.” When those two rules were violated, the Southern men went outside the law.

  In contrast, those opposed to black rule and race-mixing today never (except for a few samizdat-press bloggers) recommend going outside the parameters of modern democracy. (2) Such people do not really believe in the values of old Europe because they put adherence to the democratic process above loyalty to European civilization. Lindbergh was right when he claimed that the modern struggle had nothing to do with political systems; it was and is about race. If you accept the rules of your enemy, who only allows you to vote for a slow death or a quick death, you will be bereft of everything that Europeans once held dear.

• The women remained loyal.
  Buried somewhere in the pile of papers on my desk is an article by a Book-of-Common-Prayer, old rite, Anglican clergyman. In the article, the reverend, citing St. Paul, says that in every civilization the women are the last to go over to the devil, but when they do go, they are worse than the men. Shakespeare made the same observation in Macbeth, and Tennyson echoed the sentiment in the Idylls of the King. (3)

  During the Babylonian captivity, which the North called ‘Reconstruction,’ the Southern women remained loyal to the Southern white males. There was a spiritual symmetry between the Southern male and female. The male’s willingness to go forth in defense of hearth and home earned the female’s love and loyalty. And her love increased the male’s ardor to protect and defend which in turn increased the woman’s fidelity.

  The testimony of men like Page, as unbelievable as it seems in our modern age, cannot be doubted; the Southern women remained faithful to their men and their civilization despite facing starvation and dislocation. Only a tiny minority broke rank and went with the carpetbaggers and the Negroes. Today it is exactly the opposite. Only a tiny fragment of females, much smaller than the remnant of white males, have remained loyal to the white race.

  It is customary to blame the infidelity of the white female on the white male. There is some justification for that accusation; the white male has done little to inspire fidelity. But ultimately, the blame for any sin must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the sinner. White females, with some heroic exceptions, have descended to the lowest level of creation. They were wives and mothers in a civilization consecrated to Him, which is a position above the angels, and they descended from those heights to become concubines to Satan and his minions. “O Hamlet, what a falling off was there!”

• The white males stood tall.
  There were some Southern white men who cut deals with the usurpers and the Negroes, but in the main the whites stood together, which is why they prevailed.

  Today the situation is quite different. Some of the most virulent anti-white groups and anti-white white men are from the South. Witness the Southern Poverty Law Center and Thomas Fleming.

• Northern opposition to the Southern whites was not a monolith.
  Certainly the men who passed the Reconstruction legislation in Congress and the evangelical Christians who went over to Unitarianism and Negro worship were maniacally opposed to the Southern whites, but there was another element in the North, people who were sympathetic to the Southern white. Let me provide a short anecdote. My grandfather’s grandfather fought for the North in the Civil War. He lived well past age 90, so my grandfather had many opportunities to talk with him about the War. And I fortunately had many opportunities to talk with my grandfather about his grandfather. I believe this is called an oral tradition.

  What my great, great, grandfather told my grandfather is pertinent to the issue of the Northern sentiment toward the South. “They told me I was fighting for the Union. If I had known I was fighting to free the negroes, I would have joined the other side.”

  A committed elite always governs, but that elite is dependent on their ability to confuse and dazzle the masses. When their patter no longer confuses and dazzles, they lose ground. Reconstruction ended because the Southern whites stood firm and because the Northern Unitarians were no longer able to convince the great unwashed that the Southern whites ate Negro babies for breakfast and whipped Negro adults in the afternoon.

  Let’s fast-forward to the second half of the twentieth century. The Unitarian universalists retrenched and went back on the offensive. By 1950, they had succeeded in once again convincing the North, the Midwest, the West, and the rest of the European people that the Southern Europeans were devils. And even the Southern people themselves came to believe in the evils of the old South. It was no coincidence that the British ceased to believe in Britain, the Spanish in Spain, the French in France, etc., at the same time. The South was an extension of Europe; Satan would not attack one without attacking the other.

• The Christian religion was the source of the Southern white man’s love for his race.
  I read an article recently by a white pagan author. Although I shared his desire for the survival of the white race, I did not agree with his analysis of the race issue. He made the point that the love of their own race was embedded deeply in the souls of our European ancestors. But then he went on to state that only Christianity was embedded as deeply in the European soul. I agree that Christianity is embedded deeply in the European soul, but I do not agree with the separation that my pagan ally makes. If you read a novel like Red Rock you can’t help but be struck by the fact that Christianity and the love of their race was so intertwined in the souls of the Southern whites, that a separation of the two is impossible.

  I think we miss something essential if we do not see how love of race and love of Christ are interwoven in the soul of the European. When the European embraced Christ, he did not suddenly lose the virtues he already possessed. Those virtues were extended and deepened. Shame became guilt and kindness was transformed into charity. And pride of race, the desire to see one’s race perpetuated became love of race and a desire to see the individual members of one’s beloved race survive in perpetuity. (4) It is true that you should not have to prove that your race is more intelligent, more beautiful, etc., in order to desire its survival. It should be enough to say, “It is my own and I love it.” But we must see that such an appeal –“It is my own and I love it” — will have no effect on the barbarian or the post-Christian white. They do not view race and love in the same way that the white Christian does. The barbarian does not love his race. He has pride of race; he wants it to be powerful, to be the dominant race, but he does not love it. This is why the weak, in barbarian cultures, are exterminated. They do not enhance the power of the race, so they are not valued. A barbarian will never countenance an argument from a white person which makes an appeal to their mutual love for their own race. The barbarian knows only power and dominance. Why should he agree to the survival of the white race when to him race means power? The survival of another race only diminishes his power.

  The post-Christian white will not respond to the appeal, “It is my own and I love it,” because he has severed his ties to Christian Europe. The new faith in science, progress, and Satan that the Northern Unitarians of the 1860s were toying with has become the fervent faith of the godless, white, post-Christians of the twenty-first century. They worship their own minds, which they have divorced from their hearts and the heart of God, and they worship the body of man divorced from his soul. Thus the colored barbarian has been accorded a throne in the godless utopia of the post-Christian white man, because he confirms the post-Christian’s belief in bodies without souls.
  
  It’s clear, from the testimony of Christian soldiers like Thomas Nelson Page, that the struggle for the Christian faith and the struggle for the white race have the same spiritual antecedents. When the battle against principalities and powers is won, so will the battle for the white race be won. +
  ____________________________
  (1) Faulkner gave Northern liberals and Southern liberals the type of Southern novel they wanted. I needn’t go into the salacious and gory details. Suffice it to say the stress was placed on the lower depths without sufficient emphasis on the higher levels of Southern culture.

  (2) I had a running debate for many years with a friend (regrettably, deceased) who thought my insistence that the white race was not going to make a comeback via the democratic process was “overly pessimistic.” It now appears to me that I was not too pessimistic but was instead overly optimistic in thinking that rear-guard candidates like Ron Paul had a chance, through the democratic process, to slow down the white decline.

  There is a great difference between someone who says that the death of the white man is inevitable and someone who says that there is no hope for the renewal of the white race through the democratic process. This doesn’t seem like a hard principle to grasp. But I must conclude that it is, because I hear the “too pessimistic” charge every time I suggest that the white man should jettison democracy.

  To me it is not a question of pessimism or optimism; it is a question of reality. Europeans who believe and act like Europeans once believed and acted are a tiny minority in every European country. Hordes of young (and not so young Europeans) grovel at black Obama’s feet everywhere he goes. Are such people going to vote for “white” candidates? Of course not.

  The reason “can-do” types get so mad at a person like me is because they think I am advising passive surrender to the enemy when I say it is over in terms of a democratic solution for the white man. But this is not the case. I am recommending that we step outside of the democratic parameters, which were parameters constructed by white, technocratic, anti-European bureaucrats, and return to the heroic mode of the antique Europeans. In that mode, political systems were a means to an end and not the end itself.
  
  (3) For men at most differ as Heaven and earth,
  But women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.
  — Alfred Lord Tennyson

  (4) Sonnet 31:
  Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
  Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
  And there reigns love and all love’s loving parts,
  And all those friends which I thought buried.
  How many a holy and obsequious tear
  Hath dear religious love stol’n from mine eye
  As interest of the dead, which now appear
  But things removed that hidden in thee lie!
  Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
  Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
  Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
  That due of many now is thine alone:
  Their images I loved I view in thee,
  And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.

  — William Shakespeare

Logical extension of the South being propositional ie non-White

THANK YOU RainBozo Confederates, for your worship of “non-White” Confederates.

What is that? Why I can hear those Tennessee Vols singing Dixie in Bantu as they happily pluck those chickens At least the Bantu Somalians are “legal” Tennessee Vols.

Of course Tysons and their ilk, like former Arkansas Governor and still scalawag HuckaBuck, have poured 100,000s of “illegal” Spanic invaders into the South for cheap chicken.   Now its real Muslims (vice Looie Farakan and Obamanation). THANK YOU!!! This is working out great! Keep it up, get your pet negro, H.K. Edgerton to the  chicken plant to hand out Battle Flags to the Somalis.

WSMV.com

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Plant Drops Labor Day For Muslim Holiday

More Than Half Of Tyson Plant’s Workforce Muslim

POSTED: 12:18 pm CDT August 1, 2008

UPDATED: 6:29 pm CDT August 1, 2008

SHELBYVILLE, Tenn. — Some workers at a local plant will no longer to be able to take their Labor Day holiday because of religious reasons.

Survey: Drop Labor Day? | Scroll Below To Post Your Comments | Video

Workers at the Tyson Foods poultry processing plant in Shelbyville will no longer have a paid day off on Labor Day but will instead be granted the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr.According to a news release from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, a new five-year contract at the plant included the change to accommodate Muslim workers at the plant.Tyson’s director of media relations Gary Mickelson said the contract includes eight paid holidays — the same number as the old contract.Eid al-Fitr — which falls on Oct. 1 this year — marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.Union leaders said implementing the holiday was important for the nearly 700 Muslims, many of them Somalis, who work at the plant that employs a total of 1,200 people.Nineteen-year plant veteran William Pentecost doesn’t agree with the decision.”I don’t think it’s right. I really don’t think it’s right,” he said.Tyson company spokeswoman Libby Lawson said by phone that, “This isn’t a religious accommodation, this is a contractual agreement. The majority asked for it.”The change didn’t bother some workers.”I think it’s fine. I don’t have any problem with it. There’s a whole bunch of them here, so they’ve got to do something for them,” said worker John Smith.”It shouldn’t happen. I mean, I think, we’re in America, you’re in America, I think that they should go with our holidays,” Pentecost said.Channel 4’s Cynthia Williams could not reach any of the plant’s Muslim workers, because Channel 4 News’ crew was not permitted on the property.Former employee and Shelbyville resident Anthony Proctor said he thinks what’s happening is wrong.He said he helped build a special Muslim prayer room that’s located inside the plant and that no other Tyson facility has been that accommodating for any other religion.”If we want to go pray, we don’t have one for Christians,” he said.Tyson is headquartered in Arkansas.Lawson said they consider religious accommodations on a case-by-case basis. She said that so far, no one has asked for any other type of religious prayer room.No one at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union’s regional office answered phone calls placed by Williams on Friday.A representative in New York said that no one there knew specifics about the new contract with the workers, but a person in research told Williams that holidays aren’t usually replaced and are more likely to be added on.The decision will only apply to workers at the plant who are union members. All other employees at the plant will still have their normal Labor Day holiday. Watch Channel 4 News at 5:00 p.m. for a full report on this story. WSMV talks to at 19-year veteran employee of the plant to get his thoughts.