Tolerance vs. hipocrisy
Tolerance. It is a buzzword in many places now. Everyone, according to neo-progressive thought, ought to be tolerant of everyone else. This sounds good, as many left-wing ideas do, except that tolerance doesn’t mean making a bigot simply put up with people whom he or she is biased against. Tolerance means, in politically correct language, “celebration.” That means the bigot should be happy about being around the group of people he or she hates, and if the bigot isn’t, maybe he or she needs some “sensitivity training.”
I remember in my oh-so-beloved hometown of Gary, Ind., that the Ku Klux Klan wanted to hold a rally there. In case you don’t know much about Gary (lucky you), you should know that the city is well over 90 percent black. Why would a white supremacist group want to stage a rally in an almost completely black community? (The mayor at the time and currently, interestingly enough, is white.) The mayor and city council emphatically rejected the KKK, saying that the City of Gary would never let such an intolerant group spread their message in their city. It was an absolutely brilliant move – for the Klan.
Why? The Ku Klux Klan never expected the city to allow them to hold the rally. The Klan’s goal was to show that even though they are seen as a bastion of intolerance (and they are), others – in this case, blacks – are not very tolerant either. If Gary wanted to make a statement of real tolerance and have made the KKK look stupid(er), they should have given the Klan permission to stage the rally and even offered police protection. What that would have said was, “We are so tolerant that we can even accept the Klan.” Chances are, the KKK would have rescinded their request, and Gary could have been a model city (for once). Instead, they decided to show how progressive they were by being less than cordial to those who don’t share their views, and in today’s world, that’s simply par for the course.
However, I did mention the mayor of Gary, or at least his skin color. The current mayor of Gary is Scott King. King ran three times for mayor (from my personal recollection) before finally being elected in 1998. Gary has attracted two separate riverboat casinos, received a Continental Basketball Association franchise, and has landed a minor-league baseball team (not to mention the stadium that’s being built for it). Abandoned buildings have been razed, streets have been repaved, and crime has gone down. All of this happened or began to happen during his first term. Yet during his reelection bid in 2000, he faced opposition from an independent candidate whose campaign heavily consisted of “looking like” most of Gary’s residents. Though there were assuredly people who did vote for the other candidate because of that reason, Scott King won. Enough voters looked at the facts – Gary improved more in those past two years than it did in the previous 24 – and voted for the person who obviously had the city’s interests in mind, despite the fact he wasn’t of the same race as the overwhelming majority of the voters.
If white people had done the same thing – that is, if a white candidate in a majority Caucasian city tried to topple a successful minority mayor by appealing to skin color – multiculturalists around the country would have been raising hell. Yet it was perfectly acceptable in the case of Gary. Why is bigotry such a horrendous thing when minorities feel the blow of it, but is mitigated, if not perfectly acceptable when whites are the victims? Maybe this is a better question: If society is aiming for equality, why are whites treated differently? They’re people too, at least the last I checked.
Progressivism tries to swing the pendulum of the system away from the “white way” of doing things to a more minority-oriented society. But just as the ultraconservatives routinely ignore the bigotry of whites, progressives look the other way when Caucasians are generalized and discriminated against. Even though progressives place their views in prettier packaging than the ultraconservatives, their views contain just as much bigotry as those they endeavor to replace. If we are ever going to get by the problems we have with race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or anything else, everyone, majority and minority, will have to be treated exactly the same.
