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Tolerance
TOLERANCE
I’m about to board a flight back to the U.S. after spending two weeks delivering human rights lectures and musical performances to youth in Taiwan. Door to door the travel time is about 25 hours. In other words, I’m about as far away as I could be from home while still being on planet earth.
TOLERANCE
In one of his many letters stressing the importance of education, Thomas Jefferson wrote that, “as long as we may think as we will, & speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement.
TOLERANCE
We’re living at a time when it seems that to believe in something means you have to do whatever you can to force everyone else to believe the same thing. A few people do it with actual physical violence. Many, many more do it with overheated rhetoric and accusation.
TOLERANCE
In 1997, a computer defeated Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess champion that ever lived. Deep Blue was a $10-million-dollar I.B.M. supercomputer specifically designed to beat Kasparov at chess. Tens of millions watched the match from around the world, rooting for the man to defeat the machine. It was a disappointing day for humanity.
TOLERANCE
One day when I was a kid, my mom brought an apple pie home from the bakery. This was a rare occurrence in our sugar-rationed household and therefore a very big deal to me. I, personally, had an open-door policy on sugar.
TOLERANCE
As I continued on the last leg of my trip, I mulled over my encounters with these two men from very different demographics—two separate age groups, two different nationalities, two distinct social statuses.
TOLERANCE
I was 28 when I met Gunnar and Lois and their son Anders. When they asked me what I thought about Nixon and Watergate, I had to buy an English-language news magazine to find out what they were talking about.
TOLERANCE
I was never one of the “cool” crowd. I had lots of friends from every one of the defined social groups in high school, but I was never “cool.
TOLERANCE
Last month, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a Geneva-based coalition of activists who helped facilitate a United Nations treaty for disarmament.
TOLERANCE
We were either going to see a magnificent astronomical event or—more likely—we were going to end up as bloody roadkill on the side of High Valley Road before we even had a chance to see the eclipse.
