In the wake of the Arab uprisings, the London riots, the Norwegian tragedy and even the African (labeled Somalian) famine, the world looks like it has done something wrong. Many see these and other similar events as a wake-up call. But a wake-up call to what exactly?
Just flicking through the many, many opinions on these matters you can see a dominant trend. It goes by the name "Tolerance". Governments in the middle east are asked to be more tolerant with their people, if they were maybe they wouldn't have taken to the streets to demand their basic rights. Right-wing everybody, be that Islam, Christianity, Jewish or even Liberal sectors of the global population are seen to be too intolerant, and that is seen as the root of many problems.
I watched a seminar by Professor Richard Dawkins recently. It was titled: Darwinian Medicine, should doctors be Darwinian. Totally irrelevant to anything I have mentioned, the seminar raised some important points to medical professionals, asking them to rethink the traditional approach to medicine, in a more Darwinian way. Most everyone should be familiar with Darwinian Evolution in this time and era, and for those of you who aren't, this neither the time nor place to do so. The idea of the mentioned seminar was to introduce a new concept in the medical field, a new perspective. Pathogens are the professional title given to anything that causes illness, and Professor Dawkins called upon doctors to look at symptoms of any given disease twice, to examine if the symptom was one of three; an evolutionary adaptation by the pathogen, or by the host (the poor sick person) or possibly a "boring byproduct" as he called it. And easing the symptoms of an illness would then depend on the classification of that symptom and so on. I am not professional, not even close, and I enjoyed the seminar. I would advise anyone involved in the medical field to watch it, more than worth the watch.
What do both previous rambling have in common, and why are they even on the same page? Take, for example, the Norwegian tragedy of late. A so called Neo-Nazi right-wing Christian brutally killed a hundred or more innocent people. Or take the Arab uprisings as an example, Arab regimes are brutally killing their people in the hundreds, in the most brutal of ways, for one reason: to stay in power, by force if needed - which obviously is the case. Similar examples can be found all over the place.
The reason these governments, organizations, groups, regimes, are powerful and allowed to be so radical and to inflict so much damage and be so "intolerant" is because they are allowed to be so. Their intolerance is tolerated, and when tolerated allowed to flourish, and allowed to become big enough to become dangerous.
The free-world, as it referred to more often than none, has a responsibility towards the global society. This responsibility is to be tolerant by not being tolerant if the intolerant. We should not let these ethnic, religious, political, ideological - or whatever their orientation may be, become so strong.
The intolerant power of poverty, the intolerance of middle eastern regimes, the intolerance of the many African groups fighting while their countrymen die of hunger, the intolerance of any group, party, or congregation should be stopped. The world can neither tolerate, nor afford to tolerate it any longer.
It is time we stood up and changed our traditional approach; intolerance should not be tolerated any longer ..
