What a week for tolerance. Same sex marriages are being accepted in more places, people continue to argue over descriptive language and whether or not to banish users of racial slurs from society, and the pope decided in a casual interview that he would not pass judgment upon gays.
In fact, it was newsworthy that the pope used the word “gay,” in English, during the interview. It was in Time magazine as if it were the buzzword of the year.
Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his famous inaugural speech that the only thing to fear is fear itself, and he was right then, and it holds true now. Fear is what causes intolerance. Fear is what turns the most placid human being into an animal in an invisible fight or flight drama. When we are afraid, we try to get rid of what causes the fear, rather than facing it and subduing it. We can easily escalate from lying and stealing, to torturing and killing for fear. None of those actions makes us feel any better in the long-term.
If I mentioned to you that, at this moment, somebody you know may be doing something that will cause them to have cancer sometime soon? Or that the stranger you just passed on the street who looked uninteresting and normal beats his wife and children regularly? Or that your cleric prefers reading Highlights for Children magazine to any other? Or that a friend you knew to be the kindest and most innocuous human on the planet tortured small animals as a youngster?
The world is still spinning, and what you know now doesn’t change what you’ve known until now. That person you know will tell you soon that they have cancer, but they will still be the same person as who you knew before. The stranger will either continue to abuse his family or something will stop him, and you won’t know it. Your cleric will give another wonderful sermon next Sunday as previous Sundays. Your friend may work at the animal shelter or not have pets at all and won’t say why, but they are still who they were a second ago.
So those same-sex couples who profess their commitments in marriage will have no effect on you (they certainly have not upset the new pope). And though people still bandy about the infamous “N” word, persons are not defined by the hatred of others, but how they are themselves; those who use slurs out of fear of what is different are themselves scandalous creatures acting blindly out of fear and deserve our kind efforts at correction, rather than our contempt. Remember that nobody has the right to cast stones unless they are free of sin, and none of us can say that.
Some folks have a tough time tolerating new things. Our senior population balks at technology in the same way that the tweens look askance at our record players in the attic. We’re all afraid. That’s the milk of intolerance.
Susan's Scribblings the Blog 