It is officially October: my sister’s birthday, Halloween, 3 midterms, and the overrated Knotts Scary Farm.
More like…Not Scary Farm.
I go to one of the Knotts events every Halloween, and I scream and cower and hide for a very simple reason: if you don’t force yourself to be afraid, you’ll realize what a sham it is. Thinking realistically it’s just a theme park covered in cobwebs and dry ice steam, and a bunch of “actors” parading around in costumes. If you go in there with that image, then nothing is scary at all…and they you’re just there for no apparent reason. So just suck it up and scream anyway.
I think it would be way scarier if instead of doing the traditional Halloween fanfare, the park changed itself to resemble Tiananmen Square. Pack all the vacationers and kids into the middle of the park, and then drive army vehicles in like they’re going to crush everyone.
Or reenact some scene from World War II. Teach your kids some history while crapping your pants as you run from Communists and Nazis.
Seriously, forget vampires, mummies, and crazy-ass Alice in Wonderlands. What’s scarier than having this chase your ass:
Mao Zedong! Run for your lives!
absolutangel64 
Hmm… don’t worry about me. I think everything is ok- thanks for your concerns^^
As for your post… I think you are trying to be subtle and ask the big question- Do we need protection from ourselves? That’s another way of saying- do we want censorship? What’s more important?- The truth in it’s purest form, or should we maintain peace by not sharing information deemed unnecessary? Transparency vs. Non transparency? Communist China’s secrets vs. a democrative country open to scrutiny, revolt and complaint? But back to being a bit more literal and responsive to your post…
Of course those things happened- there’s no point denying it. But then do we really want to bring up all those memories? Not just from a commercial viewpoint (if when people come by they remember people dying, surely that can’t be good for business can it?), but also morally. Do you really think we need to build hatred into the next generation? Sure we can’t forget and assume that we’ve forgiven others, but unnecessarily displaying or reenacting acts of cruelty and horror from the past isn’t likely to be the ideal method of education now is it? If anything, it’d likely lead to misrepresentation and provide a poor source of information (likely to create bias in impressionable minds), not to mention it may even be changed to make it more entertaining and draw more customers for the business.
As for your Hiroshima comment.. it depends who you say it to. To you and me, we find it to be quite funny (I know someone who refers to his “dumps” as World War III), but, to someone who lost their mother or father, I think they are likely to not be too impressed. I guess these days formalities and political correctness take preference over humour and jest. For those do-gooders who are offended by anything remotely tainted, they need to get a life and find something else to do- but like I said before, if it’s someone who really did lose something special/important, I’d try to avoid making unnecessary cracks. Last thing I wanna do is reignite any old fires of hatred.
You guys seem to take Halloween so seriously in America. It gives me the shits when some little kid comes knocking on our door in the middle of Dinner- I’m pretty sure most people in our neighbourhood don’t give a crap about Halloween either. I fail to see why Australians need to copy American culture. As for Freedom of speech, say what you want. I thought that guy who said Aborting Black children would lower the crime rate was very amusing… It’s something alot of people would suspect probably could help but noone else had the guts to say it.
gtg now~ thx for posting.
Well grandpa and grandma were gutsy old folks but they did flee china to HK when Chairman Mao and the PLA came marching down to shanghai … hell I don’t want think anyone that left China during that period would say there is anything scarier than Mao.