Decency better than tolerance

As I sat down to work on my column about the vital need for tolerance in a free society, something I couldn’t have planned happened to provide a better perspective: CBC parliamentary bureau reporter Ashley Burke tweeted that while she was covering the protest camp at Arnprior, Ont., her van had slid into the ditch. A demonstrator named Tyson Garneau wearing a “Defund the CBC” hat towed her out.

Garneau said he’d never leave anyone stuck like that. That included someone working for the CBC, someone whose employer he wants to be shut down. He could have sat back and laughed as his “adversary” was helpless. He could have left her to wait for a tow truck, wasting her day, limiting her ability to do her job, and making her late to take her kids to their after-school lessons. Instead, he helped her.

Decency means “marked by moral integrity, kindness, and goodwill,” and Garneau has decency.

Burke could have kept the story to herself. Having a demonstrator help her was, after all, contrary to much of the reporting by CBC reporters about the character of the demonstrators. Also, CBC was not popular at the protest and their reporters were often treated badly by some of them. The story about Garneau showing decency would then either have never been told or simply become part of the mythology mass demonstrations produce. No outsider could have been certain it happened. But Burke did tweet it, because she has decency.

My original thought was to write about tolerance, but it has become a loaded, misconstrued word, too often, ironically, used to declare our moral superiority over someone we consider less tolerant. We can disagree, and argue, and even protest against each other, but without decency we are slaves to what makes us different. Let’s be decent.