It is Monday June 20th. 2016 and the World learns that Intolerance’s have grown, people are still being Murdered. Whatever the excuse the assailant uses, the taking of an other’s life is all due to the very unique difference individuality displays. Whether that display is hereditary, they have a marked disability, that mark is an invalid, spurious, specious and illogical reasoning to target such people. If the question of Colour or Race is invoked, no one has the right to determine the superiority or inferiority of any person based on skin colour or ethnicity. Religion is not an area for human beings to commit to murder on the pretence of any faith. While these all appear to be modern manifestations, they are designations of a darker past.
They hark back to when a young girl, Anne Frank, was being terrorised and was even forced to remain hidden away, out of fear for her life. Anne could not deny who she was, she was a Jew. Anne was approached by Hitler and his cronies as a human being somehow unworthy of life. Hitler had set the principles by which humanity would be judged and by humans unfit to evaluate the credentials of others. Hitler’s Nazi’s carried out a detailed and systematic slaughter. That bloodletting has been given the term of The Holocaust and has been given over as recognition of this particular Genocide. 6,000,000 Jewish Men, Women and Their Children of Europe do not merely belong to a term, they belong to a consciousness which is growing in awareness.
However, and all too often that appreciation of a remembrance point in our civilising humanity is being abused, perverted and misapplied in purely negative ways. No person should have any form of distinction placed upon them by another who sees their Religion, Ethnicity, Race, Creed, Colour or Sexual diversity as other than acceptable. We are as diverse a range of humans as can be and all because of that diversity which is what has humanised us. That is the basic humanitarian lesson of Tolerance, the tenet of all faiths. We are each made of that same mix of moral and ethical responsibility or we cascade down into an abyss of immoral, unethical and brutal conformity. It is for each of us to express what that diversity with its toleration can mean for us all.
That very difference which Anne Frank sought to promote in her own words, has gained a momentum which charged with the essential that sees in all People a unique blend of goodness, ideals and hopefulness. Our humanity is what makes us an incomparable and principled being. Our acceptance of each others humanity is what makes us exclusively human. For those who seek to impose their will or infect us all with their belief or even infest our sensibilities with their hatred, they are wrong in all that they would profess. Anne Frank found that innate and intolerable hatred out to her cost, and in a Concentration Camp at Belsen. Here, before the accusation of all of history, within the confines of Belsen, Anne Frank was removed from existence.
Anne Frank’s message persists to this day though, and it seeps into the vocabulary of many and now articulates in the history of our World. That space we cohabit, where Tolerance must be heard above that of Intolerance’s, will engender a compassion that can all but defeat all forms of hatred. We cannot ever legislate against the random act of violence, but we can point the way toward an acceptance which decries the few who seek to entrap even more in the infamy of hate and intolerable behaviours toward other’s. Those other’s who might not look like us, or sound like us or even act like us and who might espouse to be different, have the right to live as they choose unhindered by anyone and imposing nothing upon anyone else.
“..It is Saturday, June 20th. 1942 ..Writing in a diary ..because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in ..musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. ..Paper has more patience than people.
After May 1940 ..good times were few and far between ..first there was ..war ..then ..capitulation and then ..arrival of ..Germans ..which is when ..trouble started for ..Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees:
Jews were required to wear a yellow star;
Jews were required to turn in their bicycles;
Jews were forbidden to use street-cars;
Jews were forbidden to ride in cars, even their own;
Jews were required to do their shopping between 3 and 5 P.M.;
Jews were required to frequent only Jewish-owned barbershops and beauty parlors;
Jews were forbidden to be out on the streets between 8 P.M. and 6 A.M.;
Jews were forbidden to attend theaters, movies or any other forms of entertainment;
Jews were forbidden to use swimming pools, tennis courts, hockey fields or any other athletic fields;
Jews were forbidden to go rowing;
Jews were forbidden to take part in any athletic activity in public;
Jews were forbidden to sit in their gardens or those of their friends after 8 P.M.;
Jews were forbidden to visit Christians in their homes;
Jews were required to attend Jewish schools,
You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that, but life went on.” Anne Frank.
Tragically for Anne, and 6,000,000 Jews like her, Life did not go on, Life did not Persist, it succumbed to a most vile and rancid hatred! All of which sounds all too familiar for those who have been left reeling from the hatred that has managed to hurt, main and kill those they Love. In this World, were some are required to wear a label that sets them apart, they are all too easily preyed upon. Whether they can or cannot use their bicycles to frequent the places of their choice or use street cars, trams or buses. Many might be prohibited even to this day, to ride in cars, even their own, at the behest of those who would deny them this freedom. There are countless cases of curfew’s for many who must conform to do their shopping between 3:00 and 5:00 p.m.
There are as divergent a set of trades which people are not allowed to indulge in, and for their own safety of reason, must only frequent those establishments like barbershops and beauty parlours which are ethnically and racially divided. The World curfew continues to prevent many people from being on the streets between given times, between 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. for instance. This, so that those who impose these rituals can conduct their nefarious deeds. To this day there are Peoples the World over who are forbidden to attend theatres, movies or any other forms of entertainment in case they gain an appreciation for a culture which has its civilising effects. There are People who are forbidden to use swimming pools, tennis courts, hockey fields or any other athletic fields in order to prevent them gaining from that need for social compatibility.
Social inter mingling, which is so decried by the isolationist demands of those others, denies all too many the freedom to express their own difference. There are People who can be forbidden to go rowing or to take part in any athletic activity in public for want of no better demand than it is so deemed by other’s. There are many Peoples across a wide spectrum of vistas who are most certainly not allowed to sit in their gardens to view the space they inhabit. They cannot even choose those of their friends, whose space they might enjoy to see for themselves a space which can be enjoyable. There is a timetable for all of this also and after 8:00 p.m. this sojourn in owned too is prohibited in case it causes offence to haters and those bigoted in Society.
Here too the legitimacy of Religion is evoked so as to stain us all with a difference, a separation and a finite individuality. The need of all Community’s to be diverse, charitable and accepting is denied for those of us for the very reason it is endorsed for all, with Toleration. Jews would be forbidden to visit Christians in their homes, or Muslims denied access to their friends who might be Hindu, Sikh, Christian or Jew. Learning the best way forward is the only way forward. Schools are not the province of divisiveness where a single mantra is extolled and learning is subjected to bias and intolerable distortions of truth and integrity. University’s too cannot be allowed to tutor earnestly without the format of factual honesty. It is above all else an imperative, that our teaching establishments educate. In that instructive discipline there is the equality in all of mankind which is the accepted norm rather than the unacceptably deviant.
Any such skewed idea that racism can be treated with other than contempt must be eradicated by means of a learning process that instructs correctly. Intolerance it seems allows for the few who would incorrectly inform the many so as to extort from even more any and all ability to persist amongst equals. Equality is not the province of the few, it must remain the right of all no matter how unequal they are perceived by those who would subject them to any lesser status. Those ignorant few who seek to deprive the many so that they are prevented from acting independently and are urged so that they couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that, these few have the weapon of hatred to enforce their loathsome credentials. But life goes on. It persists and within this there is a conformity of strict intolerance to a hate filled order.
Tragically, human life lasts until it is denied its very vibrancy. When all of the checks to correct bias, prejudice and hatred fails, those People who did not fit into the negative stereo type designated for them by those other’s are forbidden to exist. They are offered up on the mantle of what ever intolerance those who wish to perceive, adopt and use them can bring to bear deem fit. Murder, killing and Genocide becomes the ramifications for a human indifference we have endured for far too long. There is still a need to advocate for ever more Tolerances. There is a certainty that with the rejection of Intolerance’s, we can live in a more harmonious The dialogue is there for us all to state clearly the wrongs of hatred and the right of every living soul to remain unmolested by any form of hate filled bias or prejudice.
