Have you noticed the frequent talk in the media about “identity politics?” There’s a piece in today’s NYTimes that illustrates what I’m talking about. A reader writes that "he cannot sell his daughter on celebrating Hanukkah the way he did as a child with jelly donuts and eight nights of presents.”The presents are a way for Jewish kids to get holiday presents like Christians.

So his daughter’s “identity” as a Jew is changing? If so, her father’s changed too because “more rigidly observant Jews will scold [him] because the “real” Hanukkah has no presents to give. In other words, if you don’t observe correctly it “is a betrayal” of the tradition and therefore of your “identity.”

We’ve been watching the same conflict for a couple of decades between those who say “Happy Holidays” and “Merry Christmas.” The implication being that if you don’t say it right, you betray the Christian tradition. People get into serious fights about these tribal requirements.

In fact, we are simply watching old cultural ways of establishing membership in the tribe (identity) collapse and give way to new clues to another identity. In these cases the new ID is neither Jewish nor Christian. It is American. And this has been going on for a long time in various tribal and religious traditions.

For many, especially elders, there has been too much change. They need it to stop. They cheer to make America the way it was before the changes. And at the root of all the conflict is that people raised to the tribal traditions (including the new ones) do not know who they are if they think our ID is defined by tribal ways.

We all have a much bigger Identity than our little tribal/social ID. We all have a gender, a name, and one overall identity: we are simply humans.

THAT is who we are. We can accept and play with and enjoy those tribal tropes we learned from childhood, but we have to understand that we are more than that. When we don’t accept our common humanity as our identity, we’re headed for trouble.