I’m having a hard time with this recent cultural code, where everything we say seems to offend someone or something. We are asked to change our language to ensure we don’t offend anyone, and we must offer compassion and tolerance for all things outside of our own immediate culture. If we do not, we are criticized for being intolerant and ignorant, which I suggest to you is a pretty hypocritical response from people who say compassion and tolerance are the only means to unite civilization. As society’s sectors vie for acceptance and empowerment, we’ve reached a point where national unity is becoming subjugated to diversity.
In the interest of understanding, I’m posing the following and hoping some educated people will chime in.
If you are walking down the street and see a group of white kids with sunglasses and tank tops and tattoos and pants halfway down their asses, or a group of black kids with sunglasses and tank tops and tattoos and pants halfway down their asses, or a group of Hispanic kids with sunglasses and tank tops and tattoos and pants halfway down their asses, etc. would you move to the other side of the street, and, if so, why?
If not, can you comprehend a person’s reason for choosing to do so? Would you say they are racist if they moved across the street? Would you say they lack awareness of the cultural idiosyncrasies of this generation? Would you say they are being intolerant?
Is there any reason to think race or intolerance might not be involved in this matter so much as the idea of self-preservation?
To think that a person might not have time in his/her life to avail him/herself of all the cultural nuance of each ethnicity or culture, means sometimes people will act according to their own limited knowledge. Andif that knowledge doesn’t include the cultural habits of today’s teens, then they will move to the other side of the street simply because the people in front of them present something different and perhaps uncomfortable to their own way of living. Does this make them racist, or insensitive? If one fears something because one doesn’t understand it, does that make one a horrible person, or culturally insensitive, or racist? In today’s culture of not tolerating the people who are intolerant, it seems that is so.
So now we are faced with this ISIS issue. This is a culture many of us don’t understand, one, which feels we should homogenize humanity into one religion, under one Law, and with one goal. Eliminate the non-believers and they’ll have a world where common dogma presides.
If we do not accept their way of life, do we have to flog and berate ourselves for our lack of cultural understanding and reprimand ourselves for our intolerance?
If tolerance and political correctness and acceptance of cultural difference are the mandates for civilization, are we okay with people cutting off heads and slaying the innocent in order to espouse their own beliefs? Or, do we see those actions as anathema, and antithetical to tolerance?
Certainly we do not have to embrace their beliefs, but in the spirit of political correctness and tolerance for difference, shouldn’t we let them continue their actions without interference? If not, we would be imposing our own values upon them, and suggesting our definition of humanity’s worth is greater than theirs. We would have to propose that our system of morals and ethics and principles is more important and worthy than theirs. But, that is precisely what the concept of tolerance argues against. Or perhaps we think there is a point where we can no longer tolerate people who don’t tolerate other people.
See the problem? Tolerance and compassion only work when everyone values tolerance and compassion. When a dedicated tolerant and compassionate society encounters a society that promotes intolerance and harbors a lack of compassion, the values must bend and break beneath the onus of inhumanity, or they die.
So now what America?
When we meet these mutations of humanity who are trying to destroy the human host, will we decide to skim the gene pool, or will we embrace the virus, and allow it to reconstruct the human race.
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