Tolerance and acceptance

I find tolerance a strange—suboptimal, sometimes even offensive choice of a word for the concept it has come to represent. Personally, I think I'm tolerant of pretty much everything a decent person can be expected to tolerate, but in many cases I aspire to rather more than merely tolerating. To tolerate something implies enduring or putting up with something bad†, for whatever reason, and while it's a minimum requirement for polite interaction, it doesn't exactly sound warm.

Acceptance is a much nicer word. Acceptance implies that you embrace something; we should not tolerate and endure diversity, but accept and encourage it. If we accepted people of both all sexes and all genders, acceptable sexual orientations‡ and tastes, faiths, creeds, and so forth, I think we would have a rather better world.

What I personally aspire to, however, is indifference. Isn't it funny how negative that sounds? Yet the day I can look at a person and find myself totally devoid of judgement based on any of the things our society has so many prejudices about is the day I will consider myself a better person. I don't [want to] give a damn if you're black or white, gay or straight, Christian or Hindu (as long as you're not proselytising, because that bugs me, but that's in behaviour and not in what you believe). I [want to] judge you based on your words and your actions.

This is not to say that I don't care about the issues that exist—gender discrimination, gay rights, issues of religious freedom, and so forth—but I would like to personally address people on a neutral, impartial basis. After all, even an affirmative action approach—a particularly accommodating or positive behaviour toward members of minority group X, is founded on the fact that I think of them as fundamentally different from myself.

Even as I write this, I am very aware that there are things here that don't ring true, but that's part of the reason why I write this (and a very large part of the reason why I publically post it); with luck, some of you will tell me where and how I am wrong. It's a process of bettering myself, after all. I do not claim to live up to the ideals I set forth; I'm certainly not perfect. In fact, I'm even guilty of tolerance (of some things you may expect and some you very likely don't), and when it comes to controversial minorities, it may be that I am rarely if ever better than merely accepting.

But I do try.

†I'm aware that it doesn't necessarily mean this—your dictionary of choice will probably offer several definitions—but it's one interpretation, and if you read it as I do, that means that the implication is there. If you don't, well, this is my blog and I can rant as I like.

‡Yes, I know. But there are some sexual deviations that just aren't good, like people who get off on rape, paedophiles, and (in my personal opinion) zoophiles. I may sound hypocritical, but my philosophy is Whatever goes on between consenting adults, whether it seems appealing or repulsive to me personally, is fine; on the other hand, if one party is not a consenting adult (and I judge non-humans incapable of consent, though some animals may submit), it's not fine, and I stand by it.