I am unsettled today. Disturbed even. The level of intolerance is growing and I find myself asking the question, a common one in what was my HR profession for anyone raising a grievance, what outcome are people looking for?
I read a piece on Substack this morning. An article by the journalist Ian Dunt who writes on Substack. The headline is “Encountering the fascists outside Waterloo”. His account of travelling through London yesterday after the Unite the Kingdom protest is chilling and has disturbed a normally steady space at my core. Average people, family people, people we know, our own family, our friends, work colleagues, draped in flags, cheering on actual fascists who don’t even bother with their masks anymore. “They speak for us” they say. “We don’t mean you. We mean those that don’t integrate. That don’t share our values” they say. “We love our country and we want it back” they say. The thug, convicted in a court of law for acts of violence and fraud, they cheer. The oily-tongued politician with his own GB News show, they nod along with. People we know do this. People we love.
But what would happen if they got what they wanted?
I found myself thinking of one of my favourite stories: The Old Woman in the vinegar bottle. It is a story about gratitude or, more precisely, ingratitude. The Old Woman is never happy, no matter what wish the compassionate fairy grants her, so much so that she returns her to her original fate – the vinegar bottle. Left to her acidic bitterness.
This is the essence of intolerance. And the problem is you. Your concerns are not legitimate if your concern is someone not behaving like you. Your concerns are not legitimate if you judge someone as less than because they don’t live like you. Your concerns are not legitimate if you fear your neighbour because they wear a covering over their face. They are just not. They are just intolerance. An internal force that you generate because of something you won’t look at in yourself.
And we all have some form of intolerance. We all have a way to go to figure out how to live together and share this gift of a planet. The “you” I refer to here is me too. I am not immune. None of us are. My intolerances might be different. Some I might not even realise or are intolerance in disguise. But we can learn. We can look in the mirror and ask – if we got what we wanted, then what?
I wrote this poem today as a short story in the form of the Old Woman in the Vinegar bottle. It’s just the bones of the message for a reason. These are the assumptions behind all of the rhetoric. What the skeleton looks like when all the flesh rots away.
I don’t know whether it will do any good. I doubt those who are in thrall to the rhetoric of these chancers will allow any of this in. But I felt I had to try.
Writing and M.E. 