This summer, after 27 years in California, following 33 years in New Jersey, my wife and I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, to 1) be closer to some friends and relatives and 2) to cash in some of the appreciation of our California home.
Living in Raleigh is an interesting experience, to say the least. We found virtually everyone to have the warmth, openness and hospitality of the “South” and yet the cosmopolitan side they brought with them from the wild reaches of the country from which many of them have moved. As my wife put it, “Raleigh is where New York City meets the South.”
Claudia has a fairly Jewish-Liberal background, with periodic injections from my Libertarian slant, and I’m definitely not of the Conservative or Liberal persuasion, as a result. For these reasons, we had a few misgivings about moving to an area where there’s “a church around every corner.” If you think that’s a stereotype or non-PC statement, drive around this area for a few days, and you will discover that there is, nearly literally, a church around every corner.
Between 1968 and 1978, I worked for RCA in Somerville, New Jersey. There was a fairly high concentration of Jewish people there at the time, and while there was, I believe, a fully decked-out Christmas tree in the lobby every December, and some decorations were hung around our department, we didn’t tend to make a big deal out of it. Many of us exchanged Christmas or holiday cards, gifts and wishes. It was a simpler world back then, and the abbreviation, “PC” had no meaning at all, as neither Political Correctness nor the Personal Computer had been invented yet.
Hewlett-Packard, most engineers’ vision of the “perfect company to work for” hired me in early 1978 and moved me, my house and cars and wife out to Silicon Valley. There was a stronger Christmas influence at HP than at RCA, as the Jewish population was lower and the founders’ backgrounds included Joseph Smith’s religion for at least one of them. Funny thing is: I don’t remember which one it was. That’s how unimportant it was back then.
But December was Christmastime there. Most departments had decoration budgets and hauled out ornaments and green boughs and decorations every year. The local or divisional choirs would go around the site, singing traditional carols, and work would stop as they came by. Many of us joined in the singing, or just stood up so we could hear it better. My background and upbringing were not strongly Jewish, and I loved many of the carols, and still do, so I took no offense at any of these activities, and for the most part, neither did anyone else, as I recall.
Then the 80s happened. PC took on two meanings and people began to get paranoid about not offending anyone for any reason, and that included the workplace as well as city decorations. However, I still enjoyed driving around town in the residential areas, admiring the beautiful decorations that homeowners had put together. Oh, yes. I also succumbed to one of the other traditions of being in California and being in my 40s: my wife and I divorced. I met and married another wonderful Jewish woman about seven years later.
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I’m retired now. I retired in ’02, bought out and paid off by HP to get my old butt out of there, and thanks to many factors, my [new] wife and I are in a beautiful house, surrounded by really friendly and gracious neighbors, most of whom have added a little or a lot of decorations to their homes. Neither one of us is “strongly Jewish” and for a while this year, we even talked about putting up a … well…. Maybe not a “Christmas Tree”, but some kind of fir tree in the living room with lights on it and other decorations…. J In the end, that didn’t happen, but I did decide to, for the first time in my life, put some decorations on the front of the house. I bought some blue “icicle” lights and hung them from the gutter over the porch, where icicles might actually form if we got enough weather to do that. I enjoyed engineering the hanging and the wiring of the lights, but it’s a modest decoration.
This year.
Next year, I think we may have more lights, and maybe white ones to go with the blue. Maybe even red and green ones, too.
The local newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer has, over the past weeks, seen many letters to the editor and comments about the problems with “de-Christmassing Christmas.” Most of the letters seem to come from Christians who seem afraid that without the Nativity Scene in the Town Center, their religion will be crushed by all of the stampeding secularists around them. It’s interesting to watch from the sidelines as people take sides in a battle that I don’t consider needs to be fought at all. As a Jew and a Libertarian, you can hardly imagine how outnumbered I feel in my opinions….
My beliefs? If you want to pray in the workplace, you should be free to do it, so long as it doesn’t interfere with your co-workers or the work process or environment. Find a quiet place, meditate, pray, kneel, sing, whatever. But not in your cubicle or on the production line or in front of customers. If you want to decorate your cubicle, fine. But not with religious symbols or signs or artifacts that say “my way or the highway.”
If my religion is the majority, at least according to the best traditions and laws of this country, I should respect others’ rights to worship, pray, decorate, or whatever. If my religion is in the minority, I should be allowed the same privileges. As a Libertarian, I want to include one of the old Libertarian sayings: “Your rights stop at the tip of my nose or the tips of my toes, whichever stick out further.” Following your religion is not the same as promoting it. Praying is not the same as proselytizing. Decorations are fine as long as mine don’t get in your way and yours don’t get in mine. And in the end, you’re there because the Company hired you to be there to do something for them. You’re using their desks, chairs, tools, walls, floors, phones. They have the right to lay down rules if they think you’re getting in the way of the Company getting its Job done. And I’d like it if they were to agree with my belief that praying, etc., done respectfully and low key, can be done in such a way that doesn’t interfere with co-workers of the Company’s goals.
Alan Falk,
Raleigh, NC. |
