How I helped to take the religion out of banking

So I was walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan one day a couple of months ago, and I passed by the HSBC tower, a towering phallic monument to commerce that’s just a few short blocks from Bryant Park and is somehow constantly surrounded by a sea of office workers. I went to use the ATM, and noticed that more than one entrance to the building bore a blatant mezuzah in its doorway. See the photographic evidence below (sorry, I took the pictures on my cell phone and couldn’t figure out how to get them off, so I had to take a picture of the phone):

After snapping these shots, I went home and logged onto the HSBC website. Now, their comment page made it very difficult to get my point across. I had to reduce my original argument down to barely a couple of sentence fragments, but goddammit, I told my side of the story. I felt that as a business that claims to value diversity (their ads are all about this theme) they should understand that some of their account holders, like me, are not religious, and many others follow other religions than the Jewish faith. I also mentioned that employees of the bank who do not follow this faith could be understandably upset by this obvious display of religion. If a business I frequent suddenly starts displaying a giant cross, I get the hell out of there. That’s my motto. They wouldn’t like it if I went into their bank and started pushing religion on customers, so I just wanted to know why I had to be subjected to religion when I stepped in to do some business. I ended my brief and paraphrased (to cut down on the word count) message by asking if they could recommend any banks in the area that didn’t display religious icons in their buildings.

Well, fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I was walking down that very same block past those very same doorways. But lo! What should I find? The mezuzahs had been painted over with black paint! The frames were still there, mind you, but the general effect was an inoffensive black plaque that blended in with the rest of the doorway.

Could it be that my obnoxious pro-separation-of-church-and-state rant actually had an effect? Could it be that my tiny, girlish voice swayed the mighty leviathan of HSBC to change their agenda-promoting ways? The world may never know, because those jerks never wrote back to me. But maybe, maybe some office employee at HSBC had wanted to get rid of those things for a while, but didn’t have a reason until he read my letter. And maybe my rhetoric about employees’ rights conjured up images of lawsuits that the bank guys didn’t much like. Or maybe I was only one of a few dozen people who felt that the mezuzahs were inappropriate. Regardless, I would like to think it was me, and I will accept nominations for ACLU accolades and humanitarian peace prizes starting, oh, now.