Tolerance + Silence = Agreement + Collusion.
You may be surprised that I did not have an easy time at school. I was unabashed about my faith and this was not a good thing in the popularity stakes. In the end, my parents took pity on me and I moved to a different school where I was much happier.
Decades later I had cause to reflect on this enigma and wondered why some of my colleagues did not speak out against such rough-and-tumble behaviour. As I recall they weren’t bad people, they weren’t the main protagonists, they were just eerily silent when this thorny issue arose.
Perhaps silence was their way of protecting themselves or perhaps they just thought that it was part of the everyday grist of school life. Whatever their reasons, they are lost to me now and even at the time my colleagues may not have been able to spell out what was going on for them. What 13-year-old can be that objective and articulate?
However the equation…Tolerance + Silence = Agreement + Collusion is still accurate. All sorts of times, places and people are treated shabbily. It’s glib, easy and trite to make sweeping generalisations about a certain bunch of apples because a couple of them have been found blotchy and defective. A quick look in the mirror would show that none of us lives up to the ideals we hope for. We’re all bit pimply and warty, chipped and flawed.
When others are disparaged we can remain silent and our silence speaks loudly of our agreement. We collude with the perpetrators. I would hope that adults behave more maturely than schoolyard bullies. But on the off chance that this is not the case…