By Julie Charles

IN today’s world, we are faced with a mountain of obstacles, decisions and judgments.  But, how high is our tolerance level? How often do we rush to informed judgments about situations or people? Tolerance is defined as the willingness or ability to allow the existence or occurrence of, without authoritative interference. Simply put, it means having the ability and open-mindedness to accept a person’s right to be different. We must all ask ourselves just how tolerant we are of persons who do not share the same upbringing, educational background, religious beliefs, skin colour or the sexual preference as us.

All it takes is a quick look at the global and even our local news to see that tolerance is something that we as human beings have chosen not to acknowledge. It is often believed that tolerance is the giving to every other human being every right that we claim for ourselves, but how often can we consciously admit to this practice?  Unfortunately, we do not offer tolerance to our neighbours and that is evident in the amount of crimes we commit against each other. They say that the true test of courage comes when we are in the minority and the test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority. How often have we chosen to do the honourable thing instead of taking revenge or victimising another because of political persuasion?  I am afraid that all of us are guilty of intolerance and we have used it as a weapon against persons we did not care for and/or like. We cannot correct the past but we can aim and plan for the future. The highest result of education is tolerance. This is because with the increase of knowledge comes understanding and acceptance. And with acceptance come tolerance and the willingness to overcome preconceived thoughts and prejudices we possess.

To identify how tolerate we are, we must first be truly willing to accept the good, the bad, and the ugly about ourselves. We all have prejudices and life has a strange way of making us deal with these prejudices. For me, I always felt uncomfortable around gay women so I did not put myself in a position where I had to deal or interact with gay women at all. Again, life is strange, not only did one of my closest and dearest friends turn out to be gay but also the woman who was like my second mother, as if she had given birth to me. That blew my mind because how could I deal with these two situations. I could not find myself cutting them out of my life because of their sexual preferences and, besides, I love them both dearly. This is where I learnt to be tolerant. My love for them was stronger than my being uncomfortable around gay women. Now I am comfortable, maybe because I have gotten wiser or maybe because I believe that everyone has a right to be who and what they are without me imposing my values and morals on the way they live. Because you do not agree with a love for one’s life style does not mean you cannot accept them for who they are. Tolerance is about accepting people the way they are and regardless to what they do, providing what they do, does not bring physical or emotional harm to you or that loved one. The two most important elements in a friendship are tolerance and loyalty. If you have both then you have a very strong friendship, but if these two are lacking then you must ask yourself what kind of a friendship you have.