Tolerance

There are those days when you sit at the laptop and find nothing funny to say (Not all the time, thank you.) Then you see a friend's status about tolerance and what he says strikes a chord in you. The sort of things people want you to be tolerant about is, indeed, amazing.

I mean, suppose you hit your new school for the first day and your classmates say, "You are skinny and black while we are well-built and fair. Never mind. We will tolerate you", do you really feel all warm and fuzzy, and friendly with the lot of them? Or you move cities to take up a new job and your boss says, "Well - your English accent is kind of funny. But we will tolerate you, nevertheless", do you feel that THIS is the place where you want to work for the rest of your life?

The word 'tolerant' somehow gives me a feeling of a person holding his nose and swallowing his bile, while manfully trying not to scream out his dislike. The very word 'tolerance' gives me to understand that there is something to be 'tolerated' - as if it were something obnoxious and the other person is generously putting up with it. If someone did show 'tolerance' to me, I rather think that he will not endear himself to me.

But, surprisingly, it seems that the best that we humans can do, when it comes to interacting with people who are in some way different from us, is to be 'tolerant'. There is this quality of 'open-mindedness' - of being able to look on differences and embrace them, unless they are immoral, illegal or both, that seems to have been relegated only to the dictionary as being unfit for practical use. Hence, we all need liberal doses of tolerance to even deal with different dietary preferences and sartorial inclinations. So, it is not surprising that our 'tolerance' gets tested to the limits when skin color differs or, horror of horrors, the other person calls on the Divine by a different name.

I have always felt that the very word 'tolerance' holds within it the seeds of intolerance. The moment you talk of tolerance, someone or the other pops up and says, "How long and how much are we supposed to tolerate?", sooner or later. THEN, even a Rip Van Winkle, who had been in a coma for the last twenty years, realizes that he has been gritting his teeth and swallowing his bile, in addition to being in a coma. The fact that you were not even aware of all the suffering that you put up with adds insult to injury and you start looking around for the nearest cudgel to bash up these sly people who so troubled you.

The world can do with more understanding - and, above all else, the understanding that people, who are different in some way from you, are not merely to be tolerated but accepted. Tolerance, I suppose, is much better than intolerance but, if tolerance is the best that Humanity can aspire to achieve, it does not exactly say volumes about the goodness of human beings. I mean you are not really held up as an example of goodness if all you can do is weakly protest, "But I never did anything bad".

But, then, are we still living in times when human beings thought that they had it in them to be or become noble?