If We Allow Intolerance to Define Us, Our Future is Limited.

Is retribution always the best course of action when we are faced with situations which threaten our tolerance?

It hurts to be hurt …. And we hate it when we have to live with someone who has a much different view of life than our own. It seems our only choices are to allow our anger and frustration to turn into acid in our stomach, or we can always resort to the common thing: vengeance-seeking.

Darkness enters into our souls when we begin to feel, and then especially after attorneys or our psychologists tell us that we are justified and entitled to every single thing at every single moment, and we must always seek vengeance (in the form of never-ending litigation, retribution, and repercussions) against those who have hurt us, or whose opinions go against us, in anyway.

A more realistic approach is available: forgiveness. This is difficult and it means that we will not win the situation. However, this is also the time when we are challenged to the highest degree and our deepest core values come into play. When it becomes intolerable for us as individuals to not win at all times, and then even our children are taught that they must be winners in all situations, we are setting the bar so low that we have already lost the fight.

Certainly, others may be the cause for our problems, and some situations may be less than optimum if we accept into our lives those we disfavor. But …

What happens to us when losing is never an option because it has been taken out of the equation altogether? What if we listen to those who favor retaliation, ostracization of the losers in our environments, and rage instead of acceptance? Life itself becomes unrealistic.

What if we choose to react instead of accept? It is easier to point fingers than to do the work to love and to forgive others we do not like, or wish to disassociate from ourselves. What if our educational system is now based solely and entirely on instilling absolute entitlement into the hearts and minds of our children, and nobody has to look at themselves honestly? Both of these factors have contributed to our communities having become a breeding ground for giving the devil his share.

How did this happen? If we look back at when media became pseudonymous with crowd-pleasing mentality, looking to make change rather than reporting the facts, and then when they got two big players to jump onto their horses to ride the charge beside our politicians — the legal and psychological professions. That is when their outcries and their influence expanded into every crevice of law and principle.

Both professions may have noble origins, but now the ecstasy of gold rules out any reason. Our values and core principles have suffered and nobody has paid attention.

They only make their money by having us believe we need them in order for our lives to be better. With so many ailments and so much liability out there, so many types of people and ex-offenders trying to move into our neighborhoods, they have crossed the boundaries between seeking mental health and justice, and then simply creating a false ideology that there is always something that might be wrong with you or society itself, and there is definitely somebody out there to blame for it.

They have seduced us by ingratiating the helpfulness of their professions into our psyches. By taking hold of our fears and allowing media to stir the ire of our souls, our need to find a reason to blame someone for each and every one of our dissatisfactions, and then to seek justice in the form of monetary or punitive action against them, has taken over all of our best principles.

Stop and think about something for just a moment:

If they were so good at what they do, shouldn’t life be better for the majority of us by now? After all, lawyers and psychologists, together with reactive media, have had persuasive influence over almost every aspect of our culture, institutions, values, laws, and regulations for more than half of a century. If the overall effect of all of this mental health treatment and neverending litigation was supposed to make us all healthier and provide a much safer society for us to live in, what happened? I must have missed it.

By telling us there are reasons for every one of our complaints about life itself and that others are always to blame, then tempting us to believe we can’t possibly find a way to stand on our own and navigate through life’s complexities — it is just too much for us — they have made themselves the pharaoh. They say, “We are here to meet every single one of your unrealistic needs, because we know what is best (you don’t), we are powerful beyond words, and everybody knows our professions are so noble!”

Taken together, their guidance has become the true major force to influence our culture … well beyond our religious and moral institutions.

How can you beat that? They tell you that you have to rely upon them — that you have no choice in the matter if you are to find happiness and success … that the only thing left to do is to let them help you go and get your revenge and to assist you in your retaliation against life itself!

How many people that you know who are older than forty-five or fifty would say the world, our nation, our values, are better off now than they had been thirty or more years ago? Most would say it is just the opposite.

Everyone is now a child of vision, and yet very few can see anything outside of what the pharaohs tell them to see. It is difficult to see things for ourselves when the blue light of the internet is constantly there to tell us what we should do, think, and feel. And that is where these influencers tend to spread their wisdom. When it constantly bombards us with the message that we are unhappy and someone must pay the price for whatever is making us so, most buy into that.

The worst part of this is that our children see these messages constantly and have come to believe that humanity itself is profoundly hopeless. Our educational system must find the resources to be able to teach and to instill tolerance, forgiveness, temperance, and, above all, acceptance that each of us are flawed in some way or another. Retribution and mental health counseling cannot cure everything.

A healthier view would be to see that even though we are flawed, each of us has the choice to do the best we can given opportunities both large and small that will eventually come our way. Uncertainty, ambiguity, uneven and unfair luck itself, and other flawed individuals are what life is truly and realistically all about. Maybe it is now our duty and moral obligation to humanity itself for us to let psychologists, politicians, and attorneys know that we can accept this truth now, and are strong enough for that to be okay without seeking further change, justice, or retribution.

Maybe by doing so, we can say to them that we do not need their ultimately overwhelmingly suffocating and excessive influence to fix everything at all times, which only really feeds the cycle of having us believe they alone can save us.

I believe this started when we had learned to hate and seek vengeance on the coattails of a few media stars in the 90’s who became very famous pursuing a very small population of dangerous criminals, and who championed the cause for us to love retaliation in the form of persecution, draconian punishment, and promoting violence against them.

This had come in the form of news shows and entertainment shows which had called for drastic measures to be taken against criminals who seemed to get out of prison only to reoffend immediately thereafter. Police felt justified then to use excessive force and to hurt some of them, believing that is what the public wanted. Some of these media stars gloated about how such offenders would be treated by officers and then later by other felons in prison. They know who they are and you can find them easily enough.

These sentiments took hold of us as a collective village and have insidiously now ramped their way up throughout every aspect of our principles and values — hate, scourge, and vilify anybody, and any system, that goes against or who may view things differently than we do.

The stricter laws themselves may have been justified, but whereas the laws serve a purpose and may somewhat help us; the sentiment itself could not be controlled and opened the doors to legitimize hatred and retribution. As we know now, if hateful sentiment keeps going further, it will ultimately destroy everything we love and then our society as a whole.

Now it has become such that each time we run across someone whose differences, or whose opinions, impinge upon our view of life, we think we are justified feeling rage towards them. We were a healthy culture when differences were seen as contributing to the welfare of us all even if we did not have to agree with those whose opinions or lifestyles were far from our own.

We have bartered our kindness and our acceptance of those we did not agree with, or even like so much, so that now kindness is viewed as weakness. When that happens, such as now in these times, anybody who has tolerance for the other side is automatically seen as the enemy. This has added greatly to our disparity.

Kindness is the single greatest act of our humanity, incorporating love, understanding and acceptance; and should never be viewed as weakness but as our greatest strength.

Starting with sex offenders being viewed by the public as being incapable of changing their behavior, this has led us down the dark path where it has become okay to scorn, deride, hate, and seek vengeance against all others who impinge on our world view. They are now viewed as incapable of growth and change.

Once we had found a segment of our own society that it became socially acceptable to show total disdain and disregard, we corrupted our own values and did not know it at the time. We say they have a mental illness but have no tolerance for it. At the same time, we say we want to reach out to every other segment of people in our world who have mental illness. This hypocrisy is what broke our humanity, because once we allowed this door to be opened, we began drawing lines everywhere between us and those who have issues we cannot tolerate.

There was no slowing our zeal to hate others — soon we will feel justified to seek legal recourse against someone whose tattoos or hairstyle offend us.

We are at a precipice since the two sides in our polarized country are no longer trying to come to the table. There is a feeling we have to have our way or destroy everything. We are at a point of no return.

The human mind can integrate variances well enough but when it automatically links a raging response to someone seen as undesirable or opposed to our views, then intolerance prevails and we cannot accept that they have rights to their opinions. Our media has given us license to link rage to our dissatisfaction with others’ opinions. Again, this probably started with media popularity in the 90’s when they sought to condemn recidivists.

The human mind needs an authority greater than itself to give us permission to tolerate and to deal with ambiguity. Right now, no such power exists within our culture. The mechanism linking rage and an inability to show kindness to those with differences challenges us; and is what now debilitates our coming together to negotiate and find plausible solutions conducive to living together peacefully.

Time has come to stop seeking a vengeful spirit and actions against all who have hurt us. If they are still maintaining hurtful behaviors, we can justifiably get them out of our lives and that is enough. We must begin to see that we have to be the adults who stop this cycle by forgiving and getting the others treatment if need be, or what have we become?

Think about your own family … how many of your own flesh and blood have done abhorrent and deplorable things, or hold views about life, politics, or relationships that are different than our own? We can hope damnation comes to them, but truly deep down, most people truly hope and want to get along with family members, get them the help they need if they need it, or to do better to understand their differences. Same applies to your neighbors plain and simple. And to others ostracized and outed as being bad people within our villages.

If you give them a fair chance, you have healed the world.

The buck must stop with forgiveness and not with seeking further recrimination or justice against them — because we know that most who did wrong were probably harmed by others in the past. Perhaps it was by other adults, other family members, through neglectful actions by a parent who was supposed to love them healthfully.

Whatever it was, how we treat others with differences or with past issues that may offend us, speaks volumes about our tolerance and our ability to show compassion by understanding and hoping for healing and not vengeance seeking through the media and through legal recourse.

A friend was at the beach recently, relaxing after a long year fighting with his friends, his family, and his in-laws over everything and nothing at all. He sent me this and I believe it.

Our only solution is simple and basic; and had been foretold long before. Forgive Everyone!

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