Ok, this has come up a few times in the past week for me. You can exhibit tolerance while still professing to your own opinions. For some reason in this culture people seem to think tolerance means not speaking your own mind, but I completely disagree with that. You can be permissive and objective about another person beliefs without having to completely bite your tongue, and pretend you agree with them. Tolerance is not the same thing as being supportive or enabling. I think sometimes people get those confused.
Tolerance means I believe want I want, and I'm free to talk about it, and likewise. If you believe in bearded sandal wearing ghosts, and sometimes eat their flesh and drink their blood, hey that's your thing. But I'm not really talking about religion here. In reality, the intolerant people are the people who profess a religion of tolerance. You know who I'm talking about. Let me take you back..
In the winter of 1992, somewhere in western Massachusetts, I was attending a Phish concert. Don't laugh, Phish was cool back then. Anyway, a bunch of my friends and I decided to start something of a mosh pit in an isolated part of the audience, or maybe it was right up front, can't remember. On occasion, our isolated mosh pit had a tendency to knock into a hippie dancer, or musical audit trail junkie (those guys writing down the set list). I remember one particular fellow of the latter persuasion, who responded in a near violent and aggressive way over being slightly touched by our activities. He sorta went from passive non verbal documenting drone, into crazed Charlie Manson type hippie. It was a very profound moment for me, because I kept thinking aren't these hippie's supposed to be about tolerance. But really, it was a new set of rules. A new culture with a whole new prescription for what and wasn't appropriate. Albeit very different from the main culture, in a way, not so different.
It was at that moment, I stopped judging people by their hair, or clothes, or musical tastes, or whatever. Tolerance is not about me subscribing to your thing, nor is it about you subscribing to mine. Look we are always going to bump into each other a little. When we co-exist the mosh pit might extend itself out a little too far. It happens. In one regard its a chance to go, hey the mosh pit thing looks kinda fun let me try it. Or maybe I tried it, ended up breaking my wrist last time, don't think it was so much fun. Or maybe, don't want to try it, seems too dangerous too me, but I respect the physical bonding aspect of it.
Now I never expected this poor guy that got bumped to participate in the mosh pit, or even be happy that we bumped into him. But it was pretty harmless, and we apologized right away. I was more expecting him to be like, no problem, dude, can you just do it over there a little. Or maybe if he had asked why we were doing that, I would have told him well, its a chance to grope chicks and have them squeeze your junk, and that would have completely changed his perspective on the whole thing.
For me, those little bumps are opportunity for learning.
For others, they want to bump you and expect you to just take it.
For example, sometimes people advertise their beliefs on social media and expect everyone to agree with them, and then get all salty if you don't. When I post something political on facebook, I fully expect to have to defend my point of view, but no one ever contradicts me, its not worth the trouble, they know what a hot head I am. For others who might post an occasional political diatribe, they never expect my discourse when I comment, and seem to get quite irritated and insulting about it. The real irony is when they go on about how they believe in tolerance. Because typically right away they made assumptions about my ideas, what I know, and don't know, and how I arrived at my conclusions. That doesn't sound like tolerance to me.
Rant complete nothing else to say.
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