See You Later, Tolerator
Take a seat, sport. I have something important to tell you. It will feel wrong at first because it opposes everything you have ever known, but soon you will feel a tickle just beneath your cerebral cortex, the part which still wants to fling poo but also values honesty over integrity, and you will then begin to understand what I am about to say.
You don’t have to love anyone of any race or religion anywhere.
The future of the world does not hinge on my nonjudgmental affection for all things human. Frankly, I don’t understand most cultures and religions, and most I plain don’t give a rat’s ass about. And that is just fine. I don’t hate anyone either. I’m just here eating my steak and watching my network television. No one died, no “hate crime” laws were broken, nobody different than me had their feelings hurt.
Look out the window. See? Nothing changed.
We cannot be the pro-individual, moral pillars we advertise ourselves to be if we deliberately ignore the hypocrisy of feigning support for a.) anyone you don’t know, b.) anyplace you have never been to, or c.) anything you don’t fully understand and respect.
The aggressive expectation of all Americans to love everyone and speak well of each other was a Petri dish of ripe bullshit cloned and forced into the public vein during the 80s. We were brainwashed with unquestioned utopian affections and are now finally experiencing the backlash.
The hallucination of a “perfect world” resurfaced in the 70s as a post-war fear of future confrontation. The lowly hippies eventually came to one groovy conclusion: love everyone.
Reenactment:
Middle-class hippie #1: [while being blown by underage runaway] “If everyone loves each other no one will fight, man.”
Middle-class hippie #2: [after exhaling massive cloud of marijuana smoke] “Yeah, man.”
With that exchange the revolution of illusion was born, and thanks to Hands Across America we passed the germ on to every man and child in the country.
The raging fire of hatred we were warned of in elementary school was not nearly the murderous apartheid it was two generations before nor was it close to the Crusades centuries ago. As a cultured people, clad in neon spandex and slap bracelets, we were far removed from that neanderthalian existence by the VCRs and Simons that kept us busy. Folks still loved to slur but it had more to do with culture and image than building an Aryan Nation.
Since the 80s, we have been under full propagandized assault, told by TV and churches and politicians and soft drink companies to love everyone equally, spiting our confusions instead of nurturing them. This forced appreciation grew fear where curiosity should have been, and as it remained hidden, uneducated and unventilated, it slowly steeped into hatred. Much how the "war on drugs" turned us into closet potheads, the "war on hate" only succeeded in pushing the hatred underground.
Now we have the backlash. Behind the cue card reading “Unstable Economic Climate” was a broken GOP that wanted its toy back. Like after a tsunami hits and grotesque creatures from uncharted depths begin washing ashore, Republicans flicked their tongues and launched a tidal wave of publicized dissent against the black president that dragged the entire sea of already frightened masses. What has washed ashore since is that mutated fear/hatred, more virile and illogical than ever.
What the answer should have been was tolerance. Instead they began systematically shoveling blind-unconditional-love-for-all-living-things down our throats and covered our mouths until we swallowed. Tolerance became the implicit default, though the word itself was shelved for lack of fanaticalness.
Now we walk on egg shells that crackle with threats of litigation. We are a nation of emotionally fragile pussies that need government to police our social interactions. The societal rifts that divide us today are the collateral damage of a civil rights movement that went limp late in the century, taping a handwritten sign on its locked front door that said, “Shut up and love someone”. Thirty years later our political rally cries have turned derogatory as the hate mutants descend on Washington, confused by media interpretations and foreign to the idea of supporting a black man.
The entire “one love” movement was grossly negligent but not irreversible. We can change our political and educational aspirations. We can teach our children that acceptance is about reference not preference. We need to answer the questions of the culturally confused and religiously frightened no matter how sensitive the issues may be. If you are Beatles fan, choose Let It Be over All You Need Is Love. More than anything we need to talk about our differences thoroughly and often, never again resorting to the lazy parental go-to “because I said so”.
What I am trying to say that I don’t like you. I am not going to pretend for one minute that I do. No one can tell me I have to or that I am wrong for feeling the way I do. But I tolerate you. If you choose to tolerate me, we will get along just fine.
