There’s a difference between tolerating the intolerant and being one

Everyone has seen it. A camera pans over the African Veldt, the heat rising in waves. A herd of wildebeest graze near the water hole. The camera zooms in as one of the shaggy beasts raises its head and delicately flexes its big black snotty nostrils testing for a whiff of any predators lurking in the tall grasses. The beast with the longest neck lives to graze another day.

In the human jungle it rarely works the same way. Quite the opposite it  seems, anyone raising their head above the crowd just might get it delivered back to them on a plate. If you want to survive it is better to keep your head down and keep on grazing.

The us versus them mentality is becoming more prominent, I’ve noticed, and not just from our bellicose neighbors to the south. Perhaps it is a backlash to the permissiveness of the latter half of the 20th century. Perhaps it has always been there and I’m just more aware of it.

There has been an ongoing debate in this sector of paradise west about wither goest sewage. The environmental movement (pardon the pun) has long chastised Victoria for not treating our effluent beyond a little running through screens to stop the really chunky stuff from getting piped out into the middle of the straits.

I know what you're thinking, what a perfect location for a regional sewage treatment plant

The Capitol Regional Administration, being made up mostly of people living in many other municipalities other than Esquimalt, decided Esquimalt is perfect for a proposed sewage treatment facility. Right in the middle of our small segment of ocean front real estate.

Needless to say, in my neighbourhood, the angels are squarely on the side of those that don’t want the smelly thing parked on our magnificent Macaulay Point. On this issue I am among the elect whose place in heaven is guaranteed by my firm resolve to keep everyone else’s poop out of here. But that doesn’t mean everyone, even under my small roof, is in complete agreement on this remarkably obvious point.

In any marriage there are points where the happy couple diverge. The honeymoon frequently ends over relatively trivial matters – for us it was when I attempted to paint the kitchen as a surprise for my dearest on his return from a business trip.

He was.

And I learned to mark cupboard doors so they go back on their original cupboards and note which side had the handle. I’ve also learned that no matter how bad things look, someone else will think they look worse. If you’re lucky, you’ll be married to him because then he has to eventually forgive you.

The point is that everyone has an opinion on everything and very rarely will there be complete agreement on even the simplest issue–like sunshine yellow as a colour for a kitchen, for instance. When the subject moves along to more complex issues like how many angels actually do dance on a sludge pump  it is entirely possible for even a wife and husband to find themselves on opposite sides of the question.

The most important thing I have learned over ‘lo these many years is that at any given time, on any given subject, I can be wrong. No matter how convinced I am of my rightness and how just my cause, it might not necessarily be quite the way I see it. If I had gone through the past few years of my life refusing to listen to the other side, to admit maybe there is another side or even refusing to let the other side think he is right, I’d have spent a lot more nights on the couch.

Really, it isn’t a big deal to be wrong nor is it always necessary to be right. The world won’t come off it’s axis, stop spinning or start on a collision course for the sun.

Of course there are times when it is very important to stand up for what you believe in and defend your ideas even to the risk of your own life. These are the big ideas, moral issues where it is fairly clear as to where the line between right and wrong falls. These are the times to stand up and be counted.

There seems to be a tendency right now to make every issue into a good/bad, right/evil kind of thing. The problem, besides a lack of perspective, is that it tends to make people see anyone expressing a different opinion as ignorant, wrong and morally corrupt. This “my way or the highway” attitude  pretty much kills any debate or even a reasonable exchange of ideas. When people allow themselves to become so deeply entrenched in their opinions there is no discussion at all because anyone thinking a little bit differently from the herd is afraid to express themselves for fear of being thought of as stupid or bad.

Recently, even in our blissful little community there have been examples of a dissenting opinion being dismissed with ridicule and derision directed not at the idea itself but at the person expressing it. That isn’t cricket, my friends.

The bottom line here is that as long as you aren’t speaking outright slander, spreading hatred or advocating exploitation of the weak and helpless, you have every right to speak your mind. I won’t think any the less of you, unless I already thought pretty poorly of you and, you never know, it just might kick you up a notch in my estimation.

When you listen to  another side of an issue, it doesn’t mean you will become a minion of the Lord of Darkness; in fact you just might learn something.

And you know what? If it isn’t worth carrying a blanket out to the couch for the night then it really isn’t worth fighting about anyway.