TOLERANCE
Last night I argued that MAGA people and the January 6th insurrectionists feel that they are good, moral people defending basic American values. Yet I think from a liberal perspective that the insurrection was not good and was certainly wrong. That is from my perspective. And while I think of myself as being a, relatively, good moral person, from a MAGA perspective I can’t be because my values undermine their basic American values. I am a threat to what is right, so not only am I not right, I am immoral and even, maybe, evil or abetting evil.
I always wondered why Republicans hated and vilified Nancy Pelosi so much. That must be the reason. They have seen her as a force of evil which led a guy to try and attack her with a hammer.
But the problem for me is deeper than liberal conservative, right or wrong. The world has a number of very different great religions and hundreds of sub religions. Each claims to be right, implying that the others are wrong, and that simply can’t be. It can’t be that the religious denomination that you and 15 millions people were born into happens to be the right religion, the fundamental religion, and that the other 8 or 9 billion people are wrong. It simply can’t be.
And yet we have a great need to have what we believe to be fundamental. We all only want to find and believe in an ultimate truth. It is hard to believe fully in a partial truth or a relative truth, you believe what you want to, I’ll believe what I want to, neither one of us is right. If I not right, why believe?
That is the way I see it in any case. I guess my current way out of this is to say that I will believe what feels right to me and that you should believe what feels right to you. The measure then is that what I believe doesn’t have to be a universal truth, it just has to be right for me.
That satisfies me for about ten seconds. But if the traditional American values you believe in lead to storming the Capitol building or destroying democracy, no matter how right or good this feels to you I feel threatened and want to round you up and put you in jail. What started out for me as tolerance immediately evaporates. I want to be tolerant but am very intolerant of intolerance.
So I am stuck, really stuck. Someone show me a way out.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 