Tolerance Town

“...the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-travellers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

                                                                       -Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

There used to be this very funny commercial.  It featured the Earl of Sandwich, holding court in his castle or mansion out in the English countryside, as if he just sat around all day thinking up sandwiches.  They had this actor made up with the blue silk clothes, white hosiery, shiny black shoes with large buckles, powdered wig, the whole getup.  The similarly dressed court would be brought to silence and he would announce a new idea for what to put between two slices of bread.  When the sandwich was presented on a silver platter he would say something like, “Peanut butter...and banana,” pronouncing banana “ba-nah-nah” and delivering the line with a flourish and maybe a lacy handkerchief in his hand.  Very clever.  Probably too clever because I have no memory of the product they were selling.

I often think of this character, or caricature, when I hear the word tolerate.  Someone sitting on a throne, bored with the little problems of the little people, and having to tolerate behavior that is obviously far beneath his station and his important time.  Like he gives a shit.

These days we are told we need to show tolerance.  We are to tolerate political views, religious beliefs, and social behavior other than those to which we subscribe.  But who am I to tolerate, or judge for that matter?  I’m not a real fan of the thinking that there are levels of people.  I’m more in the all men created equal camp.  We’re all on the same journey.  I have no business judging my equals and I could care less how they judge me.  I’m neither the fictitious Earl of Sandwich nor the Grand High Poobah of Upper Buttcrack (Thank you Stephen King from Dolores Claiborne).

Tolerate?  I’ll go you one better and ignore you all together.  

I’m from the school of if it feels good, do it.  If it makes you feel good to pray to this god or that one, if you want to follow that leader or this one, or if you want to slice banahnahs and put them on peanut butter, do it.  Read what you want, write what you want, listen to the music you want, make the music you want, marry whomever you want, make laughless movies about the bat-crazy leaders of the northern half of countries on the other side of the world.  Let your freak flag fly.  I don’t believe it’s my job to tolerate your behavior.  Knock yourself out.  I just have one request; don’t knock anyone else out.

Don’t hurt anyone.  If you hurt someone with your behavior or in the name of your beliefs, whether physically, mentally, verbally, or maybe even financially, that’s the point where you’ve forced me into Tolerance Town.  It’s a place where I now have to decide how I feel about your behavior.  It’s a place where I have no business residing.  It’s a place where I don’t like to be, like Oxnard.  It’s a place from which I will be forced to make a decision on your entitlement to my tolerance and from which I will likely find your credentials sorely lacking.  Basically, by acting the way you did, you’ve made me become the parent and now I have to pull the car over.  And we were making such good time.

So here we all are, sitting in a hot car by the only stretch of California coast that isn’t even a little bit nice, I’m pissed at you and you’re pissed at who knows what, and now no one is happy.  Way to go.  Make me the bad guy?  No, that makes you the bad guy.  You’ve gone from a “fellow traveller” to “another creature” bound to...well to I really don’t give a shit, because now I am the Earl of Sandwich or the Great Grand Poobah...you get it.  You are wrong.  No matter who you “say” you are avenging and no matter how many thousand-plus year old quotes from some long dead court reporter you present to justify your behavior.  No shit will be given from me.  Besides, you’re lying about all that stuff anyway.

Artists and writers died this week in Paris.  Intelligent people who made jokes about everyone, leaving no one safe from their satirical pens.  Had the Earl of Sandwich been around today, and had the version from the commercial not been fictitious, they would have made fun of him.  Jokes.  Just jokes. They heaped ridicule upon the powerful, which is a newspaper's job.  

They died violently and suddenly because some men found their jokes offensive to their poorly tied, twisted-knot view of divinity.  Do you know what I find offensive?  People who walk around with an air of superiority, as if they’ve been given the divine right and duty to root out all those who cast even the slightest aspersion on what they hold dear, or are mildly interested in, or pretend to be devout to in order to quench some blood lust, and then celebrate when the imaginary line only they can see is crossed and they get to kill.  

The writers and cartoonists lives were taken by men who had to exert mere ounces of pressure on a trigger to kill so many (yea guns!).  Their lives were taken by men who faced almost zero threat to their own lives for their opinions, even when they strolled into an office building (on their second attempt because they went into the wrong place at first), clinging to guns and religion, to start their slaughter (there was a police bodyguard and two other French police officers, who were outgunned and stood no chance.  Good guys with a gun easily cut to zero by bad guys with a gun).

Those artists lives were taken by men who contributed ab-so-lute-ly zero in this world and I can only hope that they will receive a reciprocal reward in the next.  But then again, about those men, I don’t give a shit.