Promoting Tolerance

      It has been said that freedom of speech, or the freedom to exchange ideas, will promote tolerance in our lives and in our society. The first amendment extends protection to hate speech and that is argued to teach us to be more tolerant in some aspects of life as well. Lee Bollinger, who came up with this idea, says that tolerance to hateful speech or ideas provides a shield to more political discourse. Since tolerance allows people to have more respect for others, it is said that racial and ethnic tensions will decrease as well. 

    Recently in the news, hate speech has hurt our nation. I believe there are two ways to go about hate speech. You can either be hurt by it, or you can take it as constructive criticism and become tolerant to it. The first option allows you to become sensitive and that will ultimately cause you to be easily offended by other things such as political discourse. I am not saying that being sensitive is a bad thing, but I am saying that being sensitive and becoming easily offended when people are trying to provide constructive criticism or their opinion to some topics can be toxic. Our country has let our history and some of the leaders from our past affect our future. We have become too sensitive to what has happened in our past instead of learning from our mistakes and becoming tolerant to them. For example, there has been news all over the media referring to our past regarding slaves and slave owners. We continue to be hurt by this while we should learn from it and treat blacks better than we did in the past. Yes, our nation has made terrible mistake in the past and we continue to make them in the future, but we should be able to learn from these mistakes and move on from them. We need to become tolerant to the political discourse and hate speech that is going on so we can be able to listen to other people's ideas without getting offended. 

    One of the hot topics in the media today is the Black Lives Matter Movement. I do believe that black lives matter, but I also believe that we have gone about this change in a poor way. I believe that if we were to grow tolerance to some of this hate speech and to the ideas some people are "threatening", then we would be able to live in a more stable and open society. We would have more respect for people and the problem of treating black people as less than would eventually decrease.