//------------------------------// // Dear Princess Celestia... // Story: The Cleansing // by BronyWriter //------------------------------// Twilight exhaled as she watched the sun sink over the horizon. Cleansing Day was over. Secretly she was a little relieved. Even though she could see the point of all of it, she wasn't quite sure she was okay with being called a bunch of racial slurs. Even less with being good at slinging them back. It seemed okay, but then she heard Rainbow and Fluttershy's perspective, and she was even less sure about what to think about the most unusual of Ponyville's holidays. Twilight walked over to her desk and looked down and the stacks of parchment and the perfectly organized quills and ink. She ignited her horn and a single piece of parchment, a fresh quill, and a solitary inkwell slid to the middle of the desk. She dipped the tip of the quill in the ink and brought it to the paper. Dear Princess Celestia, Today I found out that Ponyville has a most unique holiday, if I can even call it that, that it celebrates once a year. Every year on this date, they eschew all social norms and choose to be as racist as they want. There are a few rules and regulations, but otherwise, all racial taboos are null and void. I found out about Cleansing Day, as they call it, the hard way. I went to go talk to my friend Applejack and she called me, with some malice in her voice, a "stick head." I was, as you can imagine, shocked and hurt by her words. You know as well and I that that is not something frivolous to call a unicorn. Applejack promptly explained to me that today was a holiday called Cleansing Day, and that the purpose was to take the power away from racial slurs. Giggle at the Ghosties, as Pinkie Pie put it when I talked to her about it later. Once I understood what Cleansing Day was about, I started getting into it too. Looking back, it disturbs me a little bit how easily I was able to keep up and spew racial slurs at the earth ponies that I interacted with. I didn't really have to think about it much. I even asked Pinkie Pie if I was a racist, and she told me that I was. To hear her say it, we're all a little bit racist on some level. What disturbed me the most was that I couldn't argue with her logic, even though she waved it away by saying that it was a benign form. It's more predisposition to the familiar than straight racism, right? I think that it's a little hard to say. Then I heard the perspectives of Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy as to why they didn't want to participate in Cleansing Day. They had seen the nastier side of racism between the three pony tribes, and they couldn't condone it even for the reason that the rest of Ponyville did. That made me wonder if the ponies who were participating in Cleansing Day were being ignorant; that they meant well, but they were trivializing something that was really hurtful to other ponies. So what did I learn in the end and what is my overall perspective on Cleansing Day? Well... I'm not sure. I don't know, is it possible to go through some event and not really learn anything to speak of? To be left with even more questions than you began? Because I think that's what happened to me. I think that what I got from learning about Cleansing Day is that sometimes some event is going to come by and you're going to use it to reflect on how you view the world and your actions and your place in it, and you're not going to have any idea of what you learned. You know you learned something, but you're not quite sure what. So I guess what I'm saying, Princess Celestia, is that I'm sure that there is a definitive lesson that I can learn by finding out about state sponsored small town racism day, but after hearing everypony's conflicting opinions on it, for the first time in my life, I'm not sure what that is. I'm sure I can better myself by really deeply reflecting on what I can get out of today, but I'm not really sure how to go about that. It's a heavy topic, to be sure, but I'm not sure how to approach it. Maybe, just maybe, I'll ignore it and think about it later. Maybe I'll reflect and figure out that I didn't really learn anything. Maybe there are some events so bizarre and conflicting that you can't learn anything from them. It seems too confusing for me to sort out right now. I thought that if I put quill to parchment and wrote out my thoughts that I'd have some epiphany and get some paradigm shift about race relations in modern Equestria and how I and my perception of race fits into the grand scheme of things, but I don't really have anything like that. If you have any advice for how to deal with what I went through today, I'd love to hear it. You've been around for some of the worse moments in Pony history, so I know you've seen how bad ponies can get when they conflict racially. So who is right about Cleansing Day? Is anypony right? Is nopony right? Is either one possible? There's a lesson to be taken from Cleansing Day. I'm just not sure what that lesson is. Maybe the lesson is that you aren't always going to know the lesson. I guess I can always think about it more next year. For now, I'd say that I didn't learn anything concrete about myself or how I view the world. Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle. * * * * Celestia put the letter down on her bedside table and gave an approving nod. Her student had learned nothing that she was aware of, and for the first time, she was okay with that on the whole. She learned that she didn't always need to learn a lesson. Learning that you didn't need to learn anything may have been a paradox, but she felt that Twilight had really developed by looking at an event that she didn't fully understand and not forcing a learning experience out of it. Celestia smirked and picked up a book on Ponyville history with her magic. So, let's learn more about this Cleansing Day.