«Reasonable» accommodations

Dec-Jan 2006-2007 - North America is currently experiencing a wave of, what can only be described as, excessive tolerance. Seattle (9th of December, 2006), Christmas trees at Tacoma-Seattle airport had to be brought down after a rabbi deplored the Christian connotation of the tree and therefore the anti-Semitic double-entendre of the symbol. Further measures in Canada have allowed and tolerated the carrying of the Sikh kirpan (small knife) in schools as well as the circumvention of parking laws for Jewish people on Saturdays (Jewish Sabbath) and the clouding of fitness club windows to hide the sweaty women from the Hassidic Jews.

I must now establish that racism, sexism and all forms of senseless discrimination based solely on race, colour or sexual orientation not only disgust me but also bore me greatly by their irrelevance and conterproductivity. This blog entry is not a commentary against immigration but rather on the accommodations we must concede while in our own home.

In the fourth century BC, Alexander the Great imposed such measures of «reasonable» accommodations on his world empire. His Greek and Macedonian soldiers (and mercenaries) were forced to marry Indian and Persian women ''for the Empire'' when most of them had wives and children back home. Furthermore, Persian cities were forced to teach and learn Greek art, theatre and philosophy. Finally, the Greek people were forced to bow down to Alexander as sovereign (concept of proskynesis) as the Persians did with their previous masters, this the Greeks and Macedonians would only do towards a god and never a mortal. These measures first annoyed and then angered the indigenous people of the western and eastern worlds. By making concessions in this way, Alexander III of Macedon disrupted the cultural continuity of the Middle-East and compromised his home supporters in Greece. At his death in 323 BC, he was not a beloved emperor and a schism was soon to rupture the world empire into dozens of kingdoms and fiefdoms from Epirus and Macedonia on the Adriatic to Bactria and Sogdia in today's Pakistan. the next 300 years of succession wars would destroy the uniform cohesion he tried to accomplish. Some cultural and social differences were obviously not meant to clash.

By imposing small restrictions in the liberty of citizens to benefit others, an imbalance of privileges is created and in the long run, there is no winner. It has simply created a precedent to bypass certain laws and restrict certain liberties. This also creates a climate of xenophobia that can already be ascertained in certain small cities of Canada that have drafted «cultural living standards» to inform immigrants of local custom.

We must not sacrifice civil peace and cooperation through the use of these ''accommodations'' for the sake of social comfort and the respect of our customs. My girlfriend, for example, would never wear a tank top while on vacation in Lebanon, but would wear whatever she wished in her home town.

(Pictured: Pompei depiction of Alexander the Great - A holiday tree)

End.