As I write this, I have been attempting for more than 90 minutes to buy
a highly-desirable, and likely overpriced, electronic item at a major
e-tailer through its boxing day sale.
Which began at 8 pm. On Dec. 24.
Meanwhile, the distressingly white, two-dimensional figures on the company's web site are telling me to come back later, the unctuousness of their smiles creeping like an oil spill.
Rest ye merry gentlemen, and gentlewomen: this is not yet another screed bemoaning the utter commercialization of a major religious holiday.
Christmas is a major cause of depression, I'm told. And I'm all in favour of retail therapy.
Rather, I am seizing this moment - while children sleep, and families scramble to make last-minute preparations and deceptions and repressions - to wa(ssa)il about something much more important and relevant: political correctness.
For many years, like many people, I believed it was the height of illiberalism to wish other people merry Christmas. Doing so, I believed, made me about as welcome as if I'd offered the Nazi salute.
It was a denial of the very essence of our multiculturalism. A grand notion whose design was one of inclusion, not exclusion.
This tenuous grasp of the real meaning of the concept reached its nadir, for me anyway, several years ago. A coworker of my wife's decided that the way "everybody" in the office should celebrate the holiday was by decorating their office doors according to their own culture. As if door decorating was some kind of ecumenical activity as bereft of religious meaning as the holiday itself.
The last time members of my religion decorated their doors for a religious holiday, it was to ward off the angel of death in ancient Egypt.
That was a turning point for me. It made me realize that inclusion did not require that we all celebrate bland non-holidays. Quite the contrary: it gave us the right, the moral imperative in fact, to acknowledge and enjoy one another's holidays.
To be truly inclusive is to find joy and pleasure and positive energy in the idea that our differences make us stronger, not weaker, collectively. By learning to appreciate what our compatriots offer us, by embracing it, we come to a fuller understanding of what it is to be truly open and enlightened.
Many years ago, a journalist named Angelo Persichilli came and spoke to my Humber class. I had invited him to speak to what was then called "the ethnic media." He told a story that was another pivot point for me.
A few years prior, the Toronto Star had asked him to sit on its community editorial board, a then-new undertaking that - to put it charitably - was designed to help broaden the range of voices on its pages.
Persichilli said, "If you really want to hear my voice, then put me on the real editorial board." Ghettoization, he reckoned, was no more appropriate in print than in urban design.
I stopped trying to teach about the "ethnic media" in my class after that. It just didn't feel right any more.
I also no longer feel guilt, or hesitation, or even a twinge of political incorrectness, in wishing my friends and co-workers "merry Christmas." I am done pretending that the annual Christmas party is somehow better - more comprehensive - if it's called a "holiday" party. As an old boss of mine used to say, "Sometimes you just have to call a spade a fucking shovel."
To get back to the point: there are some cultures that see shopping as a perfectly acceptable family activity on a holiday. I just wish the people who ran my e-tailer's web site had as much ancient wisdom. They can't seem to get the thing working.
