I don’t know about you, but I am done with tolerance.
None of this is to say that I have ever been an overly tolerant person of things I dislike—I am not. However, I have recently recommitted to my disdain for things I disdain.
I do not mean to suggest that I believe there should not be a relative level of tolerance. We live in pluralist societies and going along to get along is part of the equation in many cases. In addition, I am certainly not asking our governments to do anything about what is intolerable, as they themselves are the most intolerable of the lot.
Nonetheless, if the last two weeks years to slow the spread have taught me anything, it is that the leftist narrative is a wildly intolerant thing, and—at least in personal lives—there can be no room for much tolerance of the nonsense that masquerades as policy, or expert opinion, or what have you.
The leftist ethos of our day is intolerant of everything you stand for. They hate your religion, they hate your view of marriage, they hate your view of family dynamics, they hate your view of science, and they hate your view of medicine.
Nowhere has this been more on display than in conversations about Covid—ugh, I hate that word at this point.
When this all started, we were told to “respect everyone’s wishes so they can feel safe.” Okay, fair enough, there is nothing wrong with giving people a little breathing room if they need it.
But, after the initial scare in early 2020, it has been clear for anyone willing to take out a calculator and do some basic arithmetic that this thing never amounted to—and would never amount to—a plague of epic proportions.
No matter, math and reason need not apply when someone believes the narrative, because the narrative is the fullness of truth for someone committed to it—which is ironic because usually someone committed to the narrative doesn’t hold truth in high esteem.
So, we sat back while people still held on to the narrative and stayed locked away in their homes. Then there was news of a vaccine that would save us all, so we waited a little longer until they had as many doses as was needed to make it safe for us to take a stroll around other human beings. Then we waited a little longer until they had extra doses to be extra protected…then, when everyone was vaxxed to the max, we were told that the vaxxed couldn’t hang with the non-vaxxed…because the vax worked, but not really, but it did…but just not around the unvaxxed…because science.
At any rate, this rant about the silliness of the ins and outs of the schizophrenic nature of covidian thinking is only to illustrate that it is tolerance that got us here.
Again, I do not mean that a basic level of toleration of things we do not like is somehow bad—it isn’t. However, it is tolerance of lies that got us here.
Rod Dreher may be or may not be your favorite, but the thesis of his book Live not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents is bang on.
On our own, it is difficult to do anything about the macro-lies that dominate the corporate media. However, in our own lives each and every one of us confronts a lie to be lived or let-lived each and every day.
We knew it was silly that grandma or uncle so-and-so wouldn’t come out of their house to see family for six months—in fact, we knew it was a disturbed way to live.
We knew it was wrong when they told us to put on masks, which have never been proven effective when dealing with a respiratory virus—especially not when the masks are old rags that hang on our rear-view mirrors.
We knew it was a lie that you could ever make a “safe and effective” vaccine within a matter of months, no matter how well intended.
Nonetheless, most of us resigned to letting certain things go. “So-and-so just needs to do that to feel safe,” “so-and-so just wants to fit in,” “I will just give in to this and that because I need to save my strength for more important things.”
No!
Christ came to tell us He was the Truth. Without the Truth there is no life, certainly no eternal life.
It is not a coincidence that Satan is called the Father of Lies.
Lies are not from God, they are from Hell, or from us; and when they are from us, they are from our hellish self, not our heavenly self.
Every, single, time we acquiesce to lies, we run the risk of living by them. It is a slippery slope that can become a veritable cliff if we are not careful.
How many readers have had the experience of watching a friend or family member descend into a covidian spell only to devolve from a rational person to someone who believes that their vaccine only works if someone else is vaccinated?
Can you imagine how confused someone would have to be to believe that their seatbelt did not work if someone else did not wear theirs? Or how off the rocker you would have to be to think that if you had a headache, someone else also had to take an aspirin?
The logic of the covidian narrative is no different: masks only work when everyone wears them; jabs don’t work until everyone is jabbed; and we are only “all in this together” when we stay as far from each other as possible.
If Covid is a serious illness, it is a serious illness of the intellect and an afront to truth itself.
This paradigm did not begin with Covid, though.
We were primed to live by these lies, or at least tolerate them for convenience’s sake, because we had been doing that for a long time.
We have become so accustomed to lies on top of lies as the foundation of our social framework that we were not equipped to stand up for the truth.
When it came time to tell so-and-so that this plague was not a plague; or that the ear-looped handkerchief wouldn’t stop the plague that wasn’t a plague; or that medications not working unless everyone is medicated was literal proof that they weren’t, well, working; it was too late.
We tolerated lies for so long that we became intolerant of truth. I might even go one step further and say that we aren’t only intolerant of truth, but we don’t even know what it is.
If you never hear something, how can you know that you have heard it when you do?
I might say that I am intolerant to hot sauce, but if I have never had it, or if it has been decades since I have, then how can I even be sure that I am intolerant to it if I cannot remember what it tastes like?
There is much to hope for, however, as lies are tiresome things. The continual toleration of lies is intolerable, as man was created with an intellect and conscience, even if those things become hard to find.
Lying creates a lazy and atrophied mind that eventually becomes defenseless. Yes, defenseless to lies, but more importantly, defenseless to truth.
Some say St. Augustine uttered the phrase “the truth is like a lion,” and some say he did not.
Well, either way, the Truth is the Lion of Judah, and He is not a tame Lion.
It is the time to be intolerant of lies and to go on the offensive.
[Photo Credit: Shutterstock]
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