I’m thrilled that Ms. Trunk has the courage to take on one-hot-button issue after another on her blog.
Just today she linked to an old article she wrote about Christmas. A holiday I’ve come to loathe. I much prefer Thanksgiving. There is no pressure to engage in mass spending. I meet up with my extended family and we stuff ourselves with great food and catch up on the family gossip news we might have missed in the last year. Maybe a nap and some football on TV. Now, because of my family, I actually get off pretty easy around Christmas time. There is the slight anxiousness I feel about buying gifts, but mostly Christmas has become a second Thanksgiving each year. Another big meal with family, and very little of the religious aspects of Christmas.
I realize my stance on Christmas places me squarely in the minority on this issue.
Ms. Trunk uses Christmas to outline a severe lack of tolerance of diversity in American workplaces. She lists five reasons, but the heart of her message is here:
4. “You can also take a day off for Hanukkah.”
First of all, Hanukkah is eight days. Second of all, the holiday isn’t a big deal to us, except that it’s a way for Jewish kids to not feel outgunned in the gift category. Jacob Sullum wrote in Reason magazine last year, “It is inappropriate…to make such a fuss over Chanukah, a minor Jewish holiday whose importance has been inflated in the popular imagination by its accidental proximity to Christmas.”So look, we don’t want a day off for Hanukkah. Or any other Jewish holiday. We want floating holidays that everyone uses, for whatever they want. It doesn’t have to be religious, or it can be. But we don’t need our work telling us when to take time off. It’s insulting and totally impractical.
Just because a majority of people in this country belong to a specific religious group, that shouldn’t mean that everyone who is not a part of that religious group should be mandated to live life around its holiday. The floating holiday is a Radically American idea. It outlines a specific tension in our quest for tolerance. And no our country is not a Christian nation:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
We need to stress more open dialog in this country. The kind of dialog Ms. Trunk is putting forth.
The reason some people are shocked and disgusted by the things she writes is people still feel compelled to keep parts of the human experience hidden from the rest of the world. As if the rest of the world couldn’t handle it. Maybe, just maybe, if we allow ourselves to talk openly about things, we’ll actually learn something from one another. Reading her blog has increased my knowledge of both Asperger’s Syndrome and miscarriages, among other things. I fully expect that some day a person in my life will miscarry a child. Be it a co-worker, family member, or significant other. With the help of Ms. Trunk, I’ll have a fighting chance to actually help them deal with it.
To be more tolerant in this country, we need to expose taboos for what they are: integral parts of what it means to be human. Intolerance is rooted in ignorance and fear. The antidote for intolerance is open discussion.