A Matter of Pronouns

​I think I was close to 80 when I was first asked what my pronoun was. Huh?! How about “I”? No, the asker wanted a third-person pronoun, singular or plural, and possibly a mixture of the two. Okay, so I needed to talk about myself as a third person? How about in the second person? For me, you’re a You, and for you I’m a You too. Cool! 

We are connected by our common you-dom. Wrong! It’s the third person or nothing. Of course I soon heard other people introduce themselves as, for example, a They. Wow! Not only were these folks in the third person but in multiples thereof. You can imagine how hard it was for this lifelong English teacher to think about an individual as multiplex, a singular entity in the plural. In my youth and middle years, this designation might have been appropriate for someone suffering from multiple-personality disorder, like the female star in the film “The Three Faces of Eve.”
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So I created a set of pronouns for myself that seemed best to fit who I thought I was: He-Him-We. The first two relate to my gender, both in the nominative and the objective cases. I think of myself as the same gender as my biological sex. But the last pronoun refers to my self-identification as a representative of the human race, all us all, so to speak. As someone with a doctorate in American literature, I flash on Walt Whitman barbarically yawping, “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then, I contradict myself./ I contain multitudes!” At times I wish I could also emulate St. Francis of Assisi, to include non-human animals in my We, and when it comes to our series of family cats, I guess I really do, at least somewhat.

As I write these words, the Israeli Defense Force is still in Gaza, in its ultimately impossible mission to destroy the disease of Hamas without killing its human host, the Palestinian people living in the Gaza Strip. Some folks may expect me, out of tribal loyalty, to support Israel in their violently unfolding mission. After all, Hamas struck first, and Reynold Feldman is Jewish, right? Plus the much-put-upon Jewish people support each other, including the state of Israel, no matter what. Or so the gentile thinking goes. Well, I do support the Israelis, including the 20% who are Palestinians, 18% of whom are Muslim, as well as the 1.9% of the country who are Christian and the 1.6 who are Druze. I believe and try to follow the African American sayings that “God don’t make no junk” and “All God’s children got wings!” Had I not gotten academic, profession, and family-father deferments during the Vietnam War, I would have opted for conscientious-objector status. After all, I try to follow the Ten Commandments in my life, including the 6th, Thou shalt not kill.
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So, dear reader, what are your pronouns? After reading this little essay, could I persuade you to try adding a We? This We surely hopes so.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892), American poet