ON BEING POLITICALLY INCORRECT

This Christmas season I have finally come to the conclusion that in the eyes of some citizens, I must be… I hate to admit it… politically incorrect.  I still hold car doors open for women… I still let a women go ahead of me through an entrance… sometimes I even assist a woman to be seated at a table… but worst of all… horrors… I wish people a “Merry Christmas.”  Obviously, there is no hope for me.

This realization brought a strong sense of dismay.  What event in my life led me to one day become a cultural dinosaur as well as an insensitive lout?  I decided to explore my childhood, something akin to what Ginger Rogers did as Liza Dolittle in LADY IN THE DARK.  Once she understood her past, all her problems were solved.  It was all so simple that I resolved to walk in her footsteps, exploring my past.  Someone must have been the cause of my distasteful, if not boorish, behavior.  Was it my parents…  my teachers… my boyhood chums… a girl friend… who?

In the film, Liza’s problem was easily identified.  When a child, her father yelled at her to take off a blue dress that had belonged to her deceased mother.  Since then, she couldn’t stand the color blue, she hated feminine clothing, and she always had to hold the upper hand in her dealings with others.  This knowledge enabled Liza to change her life so much that, at the end, she is on the road to true happiness.  I knew it had to be true because the playwright, Moss Hart, had spent over $300,000 on psychiatrists.  Surely he was writing as an expert.

So how did I get this way and was I always like this?  After much thought, I determined it’s a cultural thing, one that may actually be dying out with my generation.  But don’t think this is a recent revelation.  I remember the very day when my eyes were first opened to the “new” or “modern” relationship between men and women.  It was thirty years ago and I held a door open for a saleswoman who had called on me and with whom I was going to lunch.  I opened the car door for her only to hear a sharp rebuke, “Please don’t ever do that again.  I don’t like it.”  There was no way that she could understand I had been raised to believe my actions were a sign of respect for the lady… and now… I had to learn that respect could only be shown by NOT opening the door.  This fundamental reversal in the show of respect was one I never did grasp.  But then, I never sought out psychiatric help.

As far as wishing people “Merry Christmas,” that was easy.  All my schoolmates were more than glad when I said, “Merry Christmas!”  I was attending the Bronx High School of Science in 1945, and the student body  consisted of 1,993 Jewish students, and 7 non-Jewish students.  My greeting was warmly received because the Jewish students all got the Christmas holiday off in addition to their Jewish religious days. Can you understand why political correctness is a very difficult concept for me to embrace?

All of which leads me to say that, if I could, I would reach out and shake hands with each of you and wish you a merry Christmas and the happiest of New Years.  Better yet, may you all share in this Christmas season:

“Loving kindness!

A warm heart,

And a stretched out hand of tolerance!

All the shining gifts that make peace on earth.”

(David Niven in THE BISHOP’S WIFE)