PC "Happy Holidays"

Ah, the Christmas season is about over, and soon I shall be liberated from the alarm I experience every time some benevolent authoritarian accosts me with the line, "Have a Happy Holiday." The term is used in all innocence by many, I am sure. Yet there are the forces of political correctness out there, and their meaning is clear: "Have a Happy Holiday Or Else." These are the moralists who somehow always manage simultaneously to identify iniquity of one sort or another in conventional behavior and stamp it out good and hard. Some years ago they discovered cruelty and intolerance laden in the term "Merry Christmas," and now the term is gone or nearly gone.

It has been replaced with "Happy Holiday," and anyone who stands by the term "Merry Christmas" is immediately marked down as a provocateur, probably a bigot, and possibly a cigarette smoker. At this time of year the use of the term "Merry Christmas" is viewed by the politically correct as a rude and aggressive act. Oddly enough, it just might be by now. The politically correct have an inordinate influence over our language and manners. They have lured enough politically innocent Americans to their view that "Merry Christmas" is indeed a term of controversy and a consensus has probably formed that "Merry Christmas" is at least bad manners.

Really quite a pity.