The Left has co-opted so many words, or narrowed the definitions of others so effectively, that it’s hard to say anything without running afoul of the language police.
Today, I watched as my wife plucked maple sprouts out from between crushed rock in our backyard. She doesn’t like them because if left to themselves, they would take over our yard and destroy our pool. She is intolerant of the seedling invasion.
Removing the sprouts, and the few unsprouted seedlings she found, was discriminatory. She was exercising her judgment to decide which things were allowed to grow in our backyard. The pampas grass privacy shield, juniper bushes, and rhodedendrons were okay. The maple sprouts and certain other plants were not.
When I worked as a university lecturer, I used my finely honed discrimination skills to try and determine which student applicants were best suited to our university. Those that made the cut were accepted. Later in the year, I had to go through a different exercise to determine which students had to be sent “Negative Binding Recommendation” letters (expulsion). These were students who failed to perform according to the criteria determined by the school.
The school utilized benign discrimination to select an incoming class and was intolerant of poor performance. Students were warned during their entrance interviews. It was fair.
There are many things that require discrimination: judging the value of antiques, suitability of job candidates, purity of precious metals, behavior in society, and the law, among others.
There are just as many things that we may legitimately be intolerant of: hemorrhoids, dairy products, raw sewage, leaky roofs, and even unlawful and antisocial behavior. For instance, it is both antisocial and illegal to cross the US national border at any place other than an official border crossing station, where goods can be checked for prohibited items, and people may be checked to see if they are prohibited themselves due to contagious diseases or prior rape, murder, or terrorism convictions.
The idea that we must not discriminate is equivalent to telling us that we no longer have a say in anything. Whatever anyone else wants to do, we must neuter our own position and let it happen, whether it is illegal border crossing, squatting in our homes, murdering our friends and relatives, taking our jobs and positions in schools, and passively allowing poison into our veins because we are told it is for the common good. That is what a lack of discrimination is: a total loss of free will and agency.
Tolerance is a big deal. All this means is that we must pretend we are wrong about everything, unless we are among the progressive left. In that case, we are right about everything, including simultaneously opposite views, so long as that is what our masters tell us. I don’t want to be tolerant of everything. There are good reasons not to be. This includes everything on the list of special things that we absolutely must be tolerant of.
I don’t like turning on the news to see men dressed as scary subhuman monsters terrorizing small children during drag queen story hours. I don’t like the fact that when I open the swag page on my alma mater’s site (King’s College, London), I have to page through to the fourth page before finding a Caucasian model. It’s weird to see what appear to be a bunch of Antifa, Hamas, BLM, and LGBTQ Pride members modelling school jerseys in the middle of London, but that’s the way it is these days.
It isn’t that I have anything against the models in the ads, but that the administrators are pandering to special interest groups who want to overwhelm all of Caucasian society. The website is simply a visible sign of that. All of a sudden, I think of my pool surrounded by crushed rock and maple seedlings, wishing there was someone in authority who recognized the real threats posed by these twin ideas of “non-discrimination” and “tolerance.”
The issue is this; I haven’t lost my mind yet. There is a clear threat. it must be managed, lest it be ruinous for everyone.
At their most basic, discrimination and intolerance are human learning traits which allow us to judge situations to remain safe. Imagine the cave man who learned that fire will hurt flesh, so avoided putting their hand in it. It’s no different than a child who learns that a hot stove is a bad thing to touch. As we get older and wiser, God gives us discernment to judge good and evil, right vs wrong. To ignore that gift of discernment is unholy. God is shaking his head in disbelief.
Please don't lose your mind. In a way, I have been feeling the same way when I try to make sense out of what is going on which makes no sense. I retreated for a week and read "El Paso", a novel by the author who wrote Forrest Gump (Winston Groom). I chose it because I wanted to read historical fiction set in the time of Pancho Villa's raids (about 100 years ago) and get a geographical perspective of the land, the same land some people are now trekking across to enter the United States illegally. What a pick!
Reading what people had and did only 100 years ago puts a whole new perspective on what is going on now...it's the same. No joke.
So, in being so far away and wanting to offer something for that wonderful brain of yours to take solice in I send you this:
https://powerhousebooks.com/books/helluva-town-new-york-city-in-the-1940s-and-50s/
Heck, I would even send you my autographed copy. The 40s and 50s were a mere "sneeze" ago. This is all going to get worked through and recorded...
President Wilson, Mexico, Pancho Villa, trains, cattle and cowboys all did. Lt. Patton chased Pancho Villa a bit and oh my, look what lie ahead for him.