2. Live and Let Live

My own point of view ... take it for what it's worth.

One notion that we find ourselves called on to agree with and really can't, in good conscience, is that there is one way of life that is right and all should be compelled to follow it - NOW! Some, proclaiming themselves to be "multiculturalists", will deny that they believe this, but then go on to say that these other cultures "should just" ... adopt a series of changes that would reduce them to being little more than slight variants on the speaker's own culture, with maybe a national garb and a few holiday recipes graciously left to it, as window dressing. Real differences are dismissed as being either ignorant or hateful.

let us add that in a Pagan context, even the slight differences tend to be shown slight tolerance. For example, given our partially Hellenic tradition, we won't consume food laid out after a calling of the quarters. Why? Because in the old Hellenic tradition, apparently, the winds (ie. the guardians of the watchtowers) were considered to by Cthonic (ie. underworld) divinities, and a meal served after a ritualised evocation of a god is considered to be a sacrifice. One does not partake of a sacrifice laid out for these deities (ie. symbolically share a meal with them) - to do so is to encourage the deities in question to issue an invitation in return. Explaining this to our Wiccan friends, tends to produce the reaction that we should stop being difficult about it. People, eating before the ritual instead of after it, is a pretty minor shift in practice. Just imagine the reaction a major variance will produce.

Real tolerance, this isn't.

Within our own borders, one of the better illustrations is the notion that those "backward" isolationist rural folk, who don't welcome people who are different from them into their communities, should be forced to change, in the name of support for equality. Wrong. If one of them decides to pull a Benjamin Smith, and go into someone else's community, with the intention of doing someone harm, because he is different, then our value, here, does compel us to condemn this act. But, it is silent on the act of refusing one entry into a community, because she is different, so long as those doing so acknowledge the right of those like her, to do likewise to one of them, should he try to move into it. So long as they acknowledge that the one they refuse entry to, has the same right to draw breath, and live a full life somewhere, as they do, and they don't try to prevent her by doing so (say, by trying to eliminate the places where she might go to be among others like herself), what is being practiced is not hate, but the wholly non-equivalent concept of seperatism.

Let us put it this way. When Crazy Horse fought to keep European settlers out of the territory of the Lakota, he was practicing seperatism. When the Ku Klux Klan travels to Chicago to firebomb a black church, that's hate. Does anyone seriously want to compare the two ? The hazing of this distinction seems plausible, merely because people have grown so used to the fashionability of the 80s era notion that one is being oppressed, if one hears the word "no" without a popular cause being invoked as an excuse, that they've forgotten that it isn't a given, or especially rational. Just because you want to move some place, and be welcomed there, that doesn't mean that you're entitled to do so. (*)

What one does see in this brand of "progressivism" is a slight variant on the old fundamentalist attitude, that humanity consists of those who live and think like them and those who haven't been saved, yet. "WE enjoy having people from all over the world wandering around. WE enjoy the mix of cultures. So if YOU don't, there must be something wrong with you, and you need to have your thinking changed." In this country, we call our isolationist friends "rednecks". Elsewhere they would be called "villagers".

Some people enjoy and even need novelty, but others need familiarity in order to live a life that they can enjoy, or even endure. Those emotional needs are as real, and as legitimate, as any others. Should one attempt to then force these people to open doors that they'd rather leave closed, and thus deny them the freedom to seek those familiar surroundings, the only intolerance that will have been seen, is one's own. Not to mention, more than a little shortsightedness, on one's part. The meeting of cultures, will be the one thing one will be helping to end, in the long run.

Let's continue.