Notes from a bitch…

It’s been a year, hasn’t it?
The end of a year is when I like to give myself the gift of reflection. I’m a big fan of inner work and this is as good a time as any to take stock of what was before stepping toward what will be. When I sat down to write my thoughts on this past year my mind kept circling back to examine tolerance.
I’m not a fan of the School of Tolerance that has held court in the social justice world. People tolerate a stench or an annoying as hell person sitting next to them on a sold out flight to Phoenix…and as soon as the opportunity presents, those same tolerant people get as far away from that which they suffered as they can.
Tolerance is a temporary thing and many a happening in 2008 highlighted that. The marriage equality fight in California, where neighbors that shared gardening tips suddenly found out that some of them weren’t down with sharing equal rights. The presidential election, where the complex diversity of the electorate ran into brick walls of assumptions and stereotypes and dishes heaped high with my oppression beats your oppression casserole served with a side of feminism is what I say it is rice.
Oh, I get why folks still send their children to the School of Tolerance despite the low graduation rate…don’t get me wrong. Respect is hard. Tolerance is much easier. Respect can’t be forced or guaranteed. Tolerance lives on the pages of Employee Handbooks and in the by-laws of Corporate Diversity Committees where people agree to practice the religion even if they aren’t believers.
I acknowledge that those handbooks and policies offer some measure of protection in the workplace and schools. On one level society desperately needs guides for what will or will not be tolerated, what should or should not be expressed, so that our tendency to destroy what is different and therefore threatening may be checked. But on another level those policies create a false sense of shared beliefs and values…and all it takes is a ballot initiative and a marriage is between one man and one woman yard sign to blow the myth of tolerance being just as good as respect straight to hell.
That’s the real, the challenge and the opportunity before us in the New Year.
As my grandmother often said, they call it the struggle because it is one…