Tolerance

September 29, 2006

It sounds better to title this post positively than to say what it’s really about: my intolerance. The common adage is that as one grows older one grows more intolerant. But when I was younger I was already extremely intolerant. Not in the grand and notable ways– I quickly outgrew my childhood racism and homophobia, borne of ignorance and small-townism– but in personal and aesthetic ways. Disliking a movie I enjoyed was like a slap in the face. Not taking my advice regarding life’s affairs was a recipe for ending a friendship. And beware the friend who disagreed with me about authors or writing!

As I’ve gotten older I’ve slowly started to change that. I’m OK with just feeling lucky that I appreciate something another may not, and I try not to give advice except in  when couched in the broadest generalities.

But in other matters I have grown more intolerant. I’ve pretty much always been a raving political liberal who was unafraid to voice an opinion, but in recent years I have a hard time maintaining more than a superficial friendship with people who are part of the political opposition.

I suppose it comes down to active harm. Those who disagree with my aesthetic taste don’t really harm my own enjoyment. Those who don’t take my advice are simply acting with the same independence I probably would. But many Republicans– particularly Bush supporters– are, as far as I’m concerned, engaged in active harm against people I love and things I care deeply about.

It’s one thing to ignore differences at an aesthetic level. It’s another to ignore it at the visceral level of people and actions which attack the very foundation of the society I live in and hurt real people I am close to. I’d like to be able to ignore that giant elephant in the room when I’m around those people, but I don’t have the strength to keep it up for very long before I feel obligated to make an attempt at changing their mind.

Supporting President Bush and the Republican Administration isn’t an abstraction. It’s a position that is fundamentally and deeply morally wrong. It’s a position that is costing people their lives, their privacy, and their civil liberties. We are in a dark time that will hopefully be viewed as a sick, twisted aberration… it could well be the beginning of the end of everything that once made our system– as flawed as it is– one of the best around.

Supporting Bush and this administration is engaging in active harm: condoning torture, supporting the worst attacks on our civil and human rights (and those of citizens around the world) that we’ve ever witnessed, working against acceptance of homosexuals and homosexual couples (not to mention advocating discrimination against them), abandoning the poor and the old, systematically driving our educational system into an even deeper hole than before, and selling out on our promises to retirees and veterans. I can sit and engage in other conversation knowing we disagree about the importance of Shelley’s poetry, but I can’t sit for very long and pretend that these active, hurtful agendas don’t exist if you’ve made yourself a part of them.
This is a horrible weakness on my part, I am sure. But I feel it as strongly about it as if I had witnessed that person engaged directly in these activities themselves…

Tags: politics, Psyche