OUR FUTURE IS BRIGHT IF WE EMBRACE TOLERANCE

When I was a teenager (we weren’t called teenagers yet in 1958, but we soon would be), I bought a 10-inch LP entitled “The Best of Sellers,” a compilation of nonsense by the great Peter Sellers. We were all avid “Goon Show” listeners, and anything nonsensical from Sellers was music to our ears.

Anyway, one of the tracks on this LP was ( and still is, I expect) “Party Political Speech”, in which a very Conservative politician rambles on pointlessly for several minutes, very much like real Conservatives then and now. One of the idiocies delivered in cutglass upper-class English is the plaintive query “but does this mean, I hear your cry, that we can no longer look forward to the future that is to come?”

Naturally, that question is very much on our minds today. COVID-19, Trumpery, civil-rights protests, trashing of Confederate icons, etc., etc., all conspire to sow doubts about our shared future on this planet.

I don’t think we doubt that the future will come (there’s nothing we can do to prevent it), but what sort of future it will be is a bit mysterious. We face a big decision about how much government we will tolerate, and what kind of government it will be. Our response to public health restrictions on our freedom of movement illustrates the varying degrees of libertarianism amongst us.

Our willingness to let go of our historical attitudes such as racism, classism, ableism, genderism and all the other excess baggage that we carry around, long after it has lost any meaning it might once have had, is being challenged.

Some of us feel threatened by equality, and others rejoice in it, but we’ll all have to accept it if we want to have a peaceful future.

Our mutual tolerance is being tested, and our human solidarity is also being reexamined, as is our common human decency.

We are being asked to decide if we wish to go forward together, mutually supportive and mutually appreciative, or to continue looking for ways to disempower, to demean, and to disrespect others.

I take comfort in the refusal of many millennials to buy into our traditional bigotry, and who judge one another by genuine qualities rather than by surface appearances. If they can manage to hold on to their attitudes of acceptance and tolerance, then the answer is “yes, we certainly can look forward to the future that is to come.”

Ed Healy Marystown