For me “acceptance” means letting things exist how they are, without trying to change them. I might approve or disapprove of certain things that I accept.
I accept the fact that my sister in law does not like to socialize with our family. I don’t like it, but since I can’t change it and she’s not doing it to be mean (although it does hurt us) I won’t try to change her.
I accept that most people in the United States are Christians. I do not believe in religion and sometimes religion causes problems for me, I accept that everyone has to follow their own beliefs (unless those beliefs are being used to harm others).
I accept the fact that most people eat meat. For me it’s wrong on an ethical level, but I completely understand that most people have very valid reasons for not believing the way I do.
I accept the fact that there are probably millions of people with mental illnesses in the world that are kind, and decent and loving people. But for me, I don’t have the capacity to take the risk (by dating someone) that me and my family will be (again) subjected to the horrific treatment that was doled out to us by specific people who had certain mental illnesses.
For me “tolerance” means allowing certain things to exist that might be controversial, icky or or completely out of my realm of understanding or even wrong in my own personal opinion, but may not be thought of in those ways to other people, and are not likely to harm me (even if I don’t like the concept) and because we live in a country where laws and freedom are extremely important for everyone’s benefit, then we all have to tolerate certain things that we don’t like or want for our own lives to get tolerance from other people in society to do the icky or silly, yet harmless, things that we want to do.
I tolerate the religious right’s ability to get up and shout on TV that they think abortion is murder. They have freedom of speech just like I do (even though I think that what they are spouting is often very wrong and very hateful and even intolerant, considering that abortion is legal).
I tolerate the fact that people cheat on their spouses and have multiple sexual partners. You would cause more problems if you tried to outlaw infidelity and lying. I don’t like it, but I tolerate it, because the alternative is worse.
I tolerate the fact that people are allowed, by law, to have as many children as they want. Because the law states that you cannot forcibly deny anyone (men or women) their right to reproduce. The reason for this, I believe, is because once you start denying people the right to reproduce you start sliding down the slippery slope of deciding which people get that right and which people do not. And it also might turn around the other direction, so that certain people would be forced go go through with an unwanted pregnancy.
I also believe that even though people say that they aren’t judgemental, each and everyone of us makes judgements about people, statements, ideas, situations and things that they see and hear and read, every single day and every single second. As soon as we are born, we start getting information and that information is filtered to us by our parents, our specific surroundings and circumstances and we make observations and judgements about things (wrong or right) simply to survive. We also learn to have preferences that are based upon what we’ve experienced good and bad.
Here’s a classic example. You come out of a theater at night, your car is parked way down the street, it’s dark and you are alone and you didn’t ask anyone to escort you to your car. First of all, why didn’t you ask someone to escort you? You have made some sort of a judgement about yourself, your own ability to keep yourself safe, you’ve made a judgement based upon your perception of the safety of the area and your perception of the likelihood of having something bad happen to you while you’re walking to your car. So then you start walking and you hear another person approaching you from behind. Depending upon your own set of experiences, you might be scared, you might think it’s someone that will give you a little bit of company or some degree of protection, or you might not think much about it at all. But you will have some sort of opinion about it, good, bad or nuetral. Then you see a dark figure pop out from a dark alleyway up in the distance, in the area where you need to go. You might be scared and start to sweat and shake, or you might hope that it is a policeman, or you might not think anything other than that there is another person there. How you feel or react is going to be based upon your past experiences and you are making a judgement. Now let’s say the person turns out to be a little old lady. Then you might have a sense of relief, or think nothing at all, or you might want to go up and walk with her to give her some protection. Again, everyone of us will be making some sort of judgement about the little old lady. Then what if the person coming out of the alleyway is a big tall man dressed very differently than from how you or your male friends dress. You might be afraid and want to cross the street, you might not think anything of it, or you might want to go back the way you came, or you might want to go up to him and bum a smoke. Each and every one of us, would make a series of judgements about all of these situations, which may be completely harmless, but we will have some sort of reaction, one way or the other, and most of us would probably have slightly different reactions, depending upon our age, our sex, our socio economic background, our familiarity with this particular area, our wisdom and our own personal experiences that were similar to this one.
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