L&T Publisher Earl Watt
I learned a tough lesson form my grandma growing up that seems to be lost these days.
Being the youngest in the group, I would be the target of the occasional off-colored remark.
When my feelings were hurt, I ran inside to the kitchen to find my grandma working on supper. I informed her of the major transgression committed against me, fully expecting her to rattle some cages and restore my dignity.
What actually happened was quite different.
“Get out of my kitchen,” was the first thing she said. “Either go play or go to your room. Nobody cares what someone said to you.”
Let’s just say Grandma’s strong suit wasn’t sympathy.
What she did was help us mature at an appropriate rate, and early on was the lesson of sticks and stones.
It’s a lesson the world could use today.
Somewhere along the line we have confused to very different concepts — tolerance and sensitivity. Both of these are tow very different groups of people.
To tolerate something is to accept something we usually don’t like or support. Hence, we tolerate it.
Tolerance is good in a free society. With freedom comes diversity — in politics, in matters of the heart, in matters of faith, etc. There are plenty of people who do it wrong form my point of view, and from where they are sitting they would say I’m getting it wrong. But we tolerate each other because we have a common value of freedom.
No one is required to live like I do, and I am not required to live like they do, either.
We tolerate differences, and that acceptance without acclamation keeps the world at peace.
Sensitivity is a completely different animal.
Sensitivity tells us our feelings our hurt, and the solution requires a modified behavior on the part of someone else.
No one is guaranteed to be free from hurt feelings. Not me when I was growing up, and not anyone else today.
Want an example of the difference? Simple. Pronouns.
Tolerance is looking at a man who wants to be a woman and saying, “I’m not into that, but to each his own.”
Sensitivity is, “You will refer to me by my preferred pronouns or I’ll have you expelled.”
Sensitivity, in many ways, is the opposite of tolerance. Sensitivity requires compliance.
Tolerance doesn’t.
Tolerance recognizes we are different but equal.
Sensitivity requires modified behavior by the perceived violator of the sensitive subject.
Free speech is guaranteed. Freedom form being offended is not.
That doesn’t mean insensitivity is ok. It’s not.
But it’s not illegal and never should be.
This is a major shift in the tolerance movement where certain lifestyles and political positions were seen as dangerous or on the fringe, but tolerance allowed them to exist.
Sensitivity goes beyond coexistence to compliance.
Those who claim to be offended by a misused pronoun also take jabs at people of faith. They expect their language to be protected while the other should be punished.
Some have actually codified sensitivity into law.
In Florida, a new law prevents businesses and schools from punishing someone for not using a preferred pronoun while states like California and Michigan make it a crime to “misgender” a person.
While one is considered a law of tolerance by preventing legal action, the other is state-sponsored compliance in sensitivity.
There was a saying Richard Mason once shared with me when someone said something hurtful to him.
“My parents told me, ‘What they say about you is none of your business,’” he said. Richard Mason was a leader in Liberal’s Black community, but he grew up in a time when real injustice existed. Still, he didn’t let bigotry or hate dictate his response.
At some point we need to be adults to our children and to those around us who complain about hurt feelings and tell them to suck it up.
That doesn’t mean to say abusive language is acceptable. It’s not. It’s just not illegal.
We have to be able to tolerate some knuckleheads sometimes, but no one should be compelled to participate.
Like Grandma taught me, nobody cares what someone else says. Be tolerant, not sensitive.
