I’d like to believe that we as the human race have progressed from the days of discrimination and prejudice, but it saddens me to see mistrust, fear and suspicion still rife in our everyday lives.
Increasingly, we see a group of people who are starting to petition for more love in the world, to build bridges not walls, to urge people to come together not reject one another. An encouraging sight it is, but there are certain scenarios I’ve thought of that could result from this, and let’s just say that I’m not the most optimistic of people.
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Scenario #1:
The good guys use words to convince the human race that love is the way to go. War, hate, conflicts and violence will no longer be words in our dictionary. The world becomes peaceful once again. Everyone wins.
Scenario #2:
Words can’t convince the people who refuse to open their ears (and hearts). Left with no choice, the good guys start imposing their value of love and acceptance on everyone, extinguishing anyone who dares go against their narrative. The good guys teach the rest of us to reject intolerance, pressuring all the intolerant to become tolerant, or else face discrimination from society. Everyone now lives in a world of fear, fear that one word, one sentence, one action would stamp the label of intolerance on their backs, bringing shame and finger-wagging. In the end, the world will still become peaceful again, but the air will be filled with tension and fear, won’t it?
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Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t promote love; love is a great emotion that should be the foundation of all our actions in an ideal world. (But then again, we’ve seen so many cases of love gone wrong.) It’s just a musing of mine that we are so often unintentionally hypocritical in our pursuits to make the world a better place, and often it is inevitable. Isn’t it ironic that violence is so often used to combat violence, and now intolerance is used to fight intolerance? Definitely, we should try to reduce intolerance, but doing so by being intolerant of intolerance would just, in my humble opinion, defeat the whole purpose of it.