Addressing intolerance

When I first started my blogs, I had an idea about addressing comments. If someone said something where elaboration of my beliefs could help, I would consider the possibility of writing a new blog post rather than a simplified response. Let's face reality for a moment. I have absolutely no social life, and I do not actively promote my blog. People are not going to comment on a blog if they don't know the blog exists.



Recently, I wrote something on my personal blog about how liberals are calling for boycotts of businesses that have ties to individuals with differing political beliefs. These boycotts come off as intolerant, and I was openly critical. In that post, I clarified that I don't want to force these people to support businesses that they don't respect. Predictably, nobody has asked me what we can do, but I think I can justify an unprovoked follow up.

Like a lot of problems in the modern world, it's easy to tie the schools to the intolerance of alternative viewpoints. Schools have repeatedly proven themselves to be anti-thought and anti-individual. Students are subjected to an environment in which everyone is expected to think the same way. Students are afraid to deviate from the narratives provided to them, and they are not subjected to variable opinions. The schools have repeatedly proven to be intolerant themselves.

Even if you can establish that an individual possesses a horrific opinion, that doesn't mean the individual is horrific overall. Personally, I don't think preference of Donald Trump over liberal extremists qualifies as horrific. I'm not a fan of Trump, but I will not embrace hatred of anyone who dares to support him. Admittedly, I'm a bit more on the conservative side of things, so I should mention another reality. I never embraced hatred of an individual because they supported the more racist and more divisive Barack Obama.

How can people not understand that good people can have divergent opinions? More than likely, it's because they have not had exposure to different opinions. Again, this can be connected to our schooling system. Schools protect students from differing viewpoints. Since independent thinkers will never consistently match the narrow and rigid views of their teachers, the schools are also protecting their students from thought.

We should have a right to think for ourselves. If people are properly exposed to people who have their own thoughts, we will be far less likely to be so intolerant of differences in opinions. In the world of the schools, everybody might share the same liberal opinions. In the real world, opinions are more variable. Exposure to the variability is one of the best tools we have to fight intolerance. Forcing opinions on children of an impressionable age while sheltering them from the real world is certainly not the answer.