Cross posted on my blog,
Todo Bien. This may create contraversy here.
When my parents were my age, my father went to Woodstock and hitchhiked all around the country living in communes and my mother was in the Peace Corp in the Dominican Republic living in a tin roofed shack with no indoor plumbing. I went to a school where you called your teachers by their first name. When I told a kid their that I didn't shop at the Weavers Way Co-Op, I would have gotten a better response if I had farted in his face. I've heard "Touch of Gray" by the Grateful Dead more times than you could imagine. Needless to say, I grew up liberal. Naturally, being a liberal, I was tolerant of other people. Or was I?
A few years ago a nice family moved in next door. I had many conversations with them, and I was always welcome at their house where something was always cooking on the grill and the Cappuccino was always flowing. These people were great people, so naturally, I thought that they were liberals. Well, it turns out that they were Conservative Christian Republicans. I guess we all assume that people who we like are just like us.
They are slowly being "outted" to the people in the neighborhood. I say this because being Republican in Germantown is like being Gay in Alabama. The exchange goes something like this, "Is it true so and so is a Republican?" Then I say, "Yes." Then they say, "Oh, I never would have known, he was such a nice guy." Needless to say, this family still lives next door and has taken to the community well.
When we were coming back from the movies, this same neighbor told me that he had a friend who was a programmer who liked beer and cigars and went to Seminary. Naturally, I had to meet this guy, because that seemed like an Oxymoron. I mean a techy that isn't a total lush? I had never heard of such a thing. If you have ever been around programmers in the heat of the battle, it is like a case study in Turrets Syndrome. You will be sitting there coding and someone will yell motherfucker or cock smoker for no apparent reason. Bitch is an often-used word, but never in a bad way. It is a pronoun, adjective and variable. You might say something like this, "Take that bitch right there and put it under that bitch." What do we call a useless column only used for testing? Well, it's a bitch field, of course. I should not forget the infamous line of code to open up a useless connection to a database, "bitch.Open".
Needless to say, this guy wasn't like that. He and his family weren't anything like I thought that they would be either. They were decant and intelligent people who welcomed me into their home and became my friends. They didn't try to convert me, although they would like me to. They didn't put me in a little category like the atheist guy who eats babies and isn't nice to pets. They are just a great bunch of people who I now call my friends. It was sometime in one of my first few visits to their house that I realized that I, too, was intolerant.
See I was tolerant of different beliefs, as long as those were liberal beliefs. I was fine with families making their own decisions until the wife decides to stay home and home school the kids. I was fine with people having whatever religion they want until they start openly talking about it. I was fine with people having all kinds of hobbies unless these hobbies included hunting.
See liberals have their ignorant group too. I call them Coffee Shop liberals. You know the type. There are about ten of them, sitting in a Starbucks on the Upper West Side or "insert liberal YUPY gentrified neighborhood here", talking about changing the world. They are hopped up on Zoloft because "they have hurts from their childhood". They talk about what to do to help the Black community, but there are no Black people there. They talk about what to do to help poor people, but there are no poor people there. The ironic thing is that the neighborhoods that they live in were once populated by poor people and Black people, but one day, the Ghetto became trendy, and these people, who love poor and Black people, drove them out of their homes because they wanted to be in the hip part of town next to the lot where they are going to put up the next Whole Foods Market.
I talked to this guy at my neighbor's house who is into all kinds of liberal causes. He said one thing that I will never forget. He said that if a corporation had the same racial makeup as most of these groups, then they would boycott it. It's funny, cause I actually went to my friend's Church one Sunday mourning. How I got up that early, I have no idea. Not only was Church fun, but this was literally the most integrated group that I ever saw. Aren't liberals supposed to have a Monopoly on diversity?
To see something like that and to realize that a year back, I would have blown these people off is something to think about. Now there are things that my friend and I don't agree on, religion being one. There are things that he would spend the rest of his life advocating that I would spend the rest of my life fighting against. But there is something that I learned, and that is that there is more that unites us than divides us. He is a programmer just like me, likes good cigars just like me, and appreciates art and music just like me.
So where does intolerance come from? I'd say that it comes from ignorance and fear. We are ignorant of what motivates people, so we put them into little groups. We divide ourselves by race, sex, religion, orientation, career, hobby, you name it. We do this because we fear that people will not understand us. Telling someone that I just meet that I am a programmer is a sure way to separate the men from the boys. They either think that you can't hold any kind of lively conversation or they are so worried about that Virus that they just got from opening an attachment on that "want a bigger penis" email that the conversation is halted. Or they think that you are in it for the money, as if people could pay me enough to do this job if I didn't love it.
Dividing this way is just nonsense, because, like I said before, there is more that unites us than divides us. We all want love, friendship, and spirituality. We all want to know that there are people out there that understand us. We all want our children to have a better life than we had. We all want a to feel a sense of community. We all want to be happy. Life is way to short to be following senseless labels.
I used to live by these labels. I would only associate with liberal people who were techies or artsy fartsy intellectuals. Why? It's so easy. You don't have to give anything of yourself. There is always something to fall back on. When you are tired of looking inside yourself or being supportive of others, you can talk about that kick ass program that you did or the fact that David Mamet is one of the best fucking playwrights known to man. You let intolerance get the best of you because you don't think that you are enough. You have to be you the programmer, you the artist, you the Black man, or you the whatever, when the only thing that you needed to be was just you.