Here’s a message that’s almost never said that our country desperately needs to hear: Americans need to be a lot less tolerant.
One of the most ironclad laws of life on Planet Earth is that you get more of what you reward and less of what you punish. If our goal were to encourage the destruction of our entire society, would what we celebrate and punish culturally be much different?
Maybe it would be a LITTLE different. Movies like the Passion of the Christ and its inferior cousin, Exodus: Gods and Kings, wouldn’t be made. There wouldn’t be anybody celebrating the military and shows like Duck Dynasty wouldn’t be allowed, but most of what we celebrate culturally these days wouldn’t need to change at all. If the whole country bought into the values being pushed by most of Hollywood, MSNBC and on Lena Dunham’s twitter account, we’d be a banana republic before Chelsea Clinton could take on Jenna Bush for the presidency in 2040.
That hasn’t always been the case. There was a time when American culture trumpeted the values that made us successful, which most assuredly were not tolerance, diversity and being nice to each other. Not that any of those values are bad. Let me repeat that: NOT THAT ANY OF THOSE VALUES ARE BAD, but they’re also not very important in the scheme of things either. You can exemplify all of those values and still be a completely immoral, lazy weirdo whose existence is a drag on the rest of society.
Yet, we don’t want to say that because it has been hammered into us that it’s so essential to be “tolerant.” When I think of tolerance on a society-wide level, a story Mark Steyn once wrote about always comes to mind.
“Once upon a time we knew what to do. A British district officer, coming upon a scene of suttee, was told by the locals that in Hindu culture it was the custom to cremate a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. He replied that in British culture it was the custom to hang chaps who did that sort of thing. There are many great things about India — curry, pyjamas, sitars, software engineers — but suttee was not one of them. What a pity we’re no longer capable of being 'judgmental' and 'discriminating.'"
How many people are there who wouldn’t want their kids on drugs, who wouldn’t want anyone on drugs living in their neighborhood, who wouldn’t hire someone who regularly uses drugs – but are okay with drug legalization and are cheerleading marijuana legalization in Colorado because of tolerance?
What about Christians who are okay with Satanists putting up Christmas displays, newspapers slurring Christianity and atheists putting up billboards attacking their faith?
Then there are the people who want the police to be tough on crime and keep criminals out of their neighborhoods who are turning a blind eye to protesters who are cheering the death of cops, blocking traffic and generally encouraging lawlessness.
We also can’t forget about the Americans who are simultaneously complaining about the lousy job market (and, yes, it is lousy when there are less people working today than there were when Obama was elected), yet are refusing to deport illegal aliens or halt legal immigration until the job market improves.
Tolerance doesn’t have to be a synonym for stupid, but it is for too many people – and the further down the rabbit hole you go, the worse it gets.
Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, had once written a school report about wanting to “repeat Columbine” and was removed from class for being dangerous, but nobody took any action until it was too late. Ismaaiyl Brinsley actually boasted on social media that he intended to kill police officers before he murdered two NYPD officers. Nidal Hassan was openly calling himself a “soldier of Allah” and reaching out to Al-Qaeda before he murdered 13 soldiers at Fort Hood.
Know why nothing was done in any of those cases?
Because Americans are obsessed with tolerance. We turn a blind eye to every ignorant, foolish, obnoxious and unhealthy behavior you can imagine all in the name of tolerance.
Americans would rather be falsely smeared as racist, have their religion insulted, have their children’s minds poisoned with garbage and see their country go down the tubes than be thought of as intolerant. We’ve become so tolerant that we’re destroying ourselves. We’ve got people openly siding against our country in wars. We’re defending traitors who publicly release our national security secrets. Protesters are walking down the street with police protection while they chant for dead cops.
How about a little less tolerance and a little more common sense? How about we start being less worried about being “fair” to people behaving badly and a little more worried about those being hurt by those behaving badly? You may have heard someone say, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” Well, in a time when tolerance has come to mean that you have to embrace lawlessness, encourage cop killers and celebrate degeneracy, then it’s time to accept that tolerance isn’t a suicide pact either.