Easter in New York city in the 1940s and '1950s meant I would get a new dress and probably also a new spring coat.
What exactly was a “spring coat” anyway? As I remember it, it was a —often navy blue —lighter coat than my winter coat, which was often red or camel colored. And it didn’t matter what the weather was, we wore our spring clothes on Easter Sunday. Much of the time I remember being freezing. This was before climate change.
And guess what we did? We drove downtown from Riverdale or Washington Heights to Fifth Avenue in our new “spring clothes” and walked down Fifth Avenue. Usually we strolled from 59th St. to 34th St., and looked at other peoples’ Easter outfits. The whole day, if you didn’t attend church, was about Easter outfits. The women wore flowered hats, and from the time I was about ten, even I wore a hat.
If we hit it at the right time we saw the really fancy people getting out of services at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 50th St. They were also wearing their spring coats and their hats. Oh, and we all wore white gloves. The white gloves of the fancy people were leather with little buttons.
Of course we were not Christian so Easter had no religious significance to us.
However, it seem to have an American significance, so our family celebrated.. It was a benign religious holiday that had no negative significance to us, the Jewish population of New York City, and it gave us a feeling of belonging to America and something to celebrate and buy new clothes for. This was in the days of the “melting pot” theory of immigration.
Looking back on things I cannot believe how much they have changed. How did we get to the bitterly divided United States from when I was born? Looking back on it see now that the dividing line for me was when I went away to college and began learning world religions, world history, and European literature. All through everything from my undergraduate days to my PhD. my education seemed to ruin my innocence.
No, that’s wrong. What ruined my innocence was the dawn of the 60s, an era pretty much like today in the United States except with more visible violence. The 60s were an era of great change that was difficult for people to get hold of, especially since they were marked by the assassinations of almost all the heroes of my generation..
Even though we fought in the 60s over the Vietnam war and civil rights, I still do not remember ever experiencing the kind of neighbor to neighbor hate and intolerance we are causing one another today. What are we doing to ourselves?
How did we get here? Why are we still afraid of the “great replacement theory” that simply means people are migrating? If you strip the racism out of it, it’s not that different from the end of the 19th century, which also saw large periods of immigration. Ah, but those immigrants were white.
Listen, I remember when Irish hated Italians. And I remember Arizona when Hispanics were marginalized, even though Arizona is on former Mexican land.
America has large swathes of open land. It has an unemployment rate of only 3.9%. We have plenty of room to accept each other and be tolerant but we have chosen not to be for selfish and emotional reasons.
This Easter,. I am going to pretend it is the 1940s again and life is simpler. I will go take a walk in a new outfit and maybe I will wear gloves and a hat. Perhaps those were the things that helped us be civilized back in the day.
OMG can you believe I would be writing something like this? Even I can’t believe it but I’m just fed up with the way Americans are acting toward one another.