Editor:
However justified last week’s article in the Feb. 22 edition of the Outlook, letters to the editor, and protest lambasting Bow Valley Credit Union (BVCU) for sponsoring a Tucker Carlson event, it seems a bit of tolerance is in order.
I have just as much a right to my political opinions as does the CEO of BVCU. To claim otherwise on moral grounds necessitates some self-reflection. Now, whether or not a business should engage in politics is a different question, but this doesn’t seem to be the primary problem.
The attacks accuse BVCU of violating its stated values of citizenship and inclusion by sponsoring the event, with a letter to the editor condemning Carlson’s divisiveness. To this, I find myself asking, at what point does your response to someone’s dissenting political beliefs only contribute to the political and social divide?
Everyone is just as likely as everyone else to be wrong about something, particularly on complicated issues. The best we can hope for is we approach these issues with humility, letting the bad ideas die out through honest dialogue, and we are treated with some modicum of forgiveness and understanding should we be wrong.
Maybe protest and public ridicule is an effective way to engage in hard conversations – maybe not. But I question the validity of the claim that trying to expand BVCU’s membership into socially conservative circles is critically divisive, any more than protesting someone you disagree with.
At the very least, those people may point out flaws or blind spots in our reasoning. Perhaps we should bring back true tolerance and demonstrate that while it's hard to tolerate the views of those we disagree with, we can always learn something. Maybe then we would feel less divided and threatened.
Canmore has citizens of all different political stripes, backgrounds, religions, and beliefs, and yet we always find to bind ourselves through a common humanity. After all, isn’t that what community is about?
We disregard and vilify someone else's beliefs only so much as we are willing to do the same to our own.
“Those who desire to suppress [an opinion], of course, deny its truth; but they are not infallible. … To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility” - John Stuart Mill
Tim Wood,
Canmore
