Dearest Reader: A proposal: Victoria’s community must learn to be less tolerant

Columns October 4, 2017

Dearest Reader,

It has been by this point established that my endlessly well-intentioned propositions, aimed at the improvement of our noble college and the surrounding locale, have proven somewhat incendiary with particular subsets of the Camosun population. I can only surmise that my wisdom, lacking peer in our halls, has fallen on ears both few and uncomprehending. The former can only be the fault of the ears themselves, and so I find it pertinent here to reiterate the mainstay of my past arguments.

Dearest Reader is a satire column appearing in every issue of Nexus.

You see, dearest reader, I am opposed, if not to progress, then to change exercised for its sake alone. While the advances of a society open-hearted to fresh developments are doubtless to be lauded, it is wonted to take us back in the other direction whenever such changes lead us to view ourselves with undue solemnity. Therefore, I raise forthwith a call to arms amongst all the good and diverse peoples of our famously liberal and loving city, one on which, in some form, my every suggestion has hitherto been based.

My friends, let us no longer tolerate toleration. Where we have previously come to believe that all among us are deserving of respect on equal footing, the plain fact is that none of us are. I can imagine no better world than one in which tensions both social and ethnic are inflamed on a daily quota, the better that we might find one another all the more absurd. Why, with each campaign waged by the disenfranchised for the rights which they lack, the unfair standard is set that if they are deserving of respect then so must we all be. What sort of standard do we set for our children in readying them for this unkind world when we teach them that respect and kindness are owed, after all? I would myself prefer to mock and be mocked in kind.

Let us reignite the flames of hatred in all its fantastically colourful forms. Once we have learned to hate one another with equitable passion, we shall then well and truly find ourselves on equal footing. Then, I pray, we may see that we are not so very different after all.