Beginning and Ending of Tolerance

To live in such a diverse community as we do demands from us to be very tolerant. But at the beginning of the year my tolerance got challenged, when students declared to be extremely homophobic. Can we tolerate people, who are homophobic? Should we tolerate them? Should we tolerate intolerance?And what is needed to be tolerant? I don’t think in order to be tolerant I have to like everyone. There are many people on campus I tolerate but still prefer not to spend my time with. Indeed there are people I avoid. Am I intolerant towards them? I think I am not. Since I still let them be how they are and let them do what they do. I don’t try to change them. This was completely different, when I was confronted with the homophobic people. I couldn’t accept their viewpoints and their behaviour. And I started wondering, how such people could be admitted by UWC. Even though I wished I could change them, I was not able to and throughout the conversation I started getting the feeling that I am not in the position to say that my stand was the better one and I had the right to judge them. Our backgrounds are so different and compared to their traditions these people are already extremely open. Is this something we should consider at a UWC? Should we judge people’s openness according to their backgrounds or according to western standards, since the UWC movement was initially a western one? When we look at our community agreement, one has to admit, that we are clearly a community that is shaped by western values and we just try to respect for example Indian traditions as far as it does not infringe too much on our western liberty. I think we keep forgetting that we actually life in India and we choose do to so. We are guests in this country and demand to live according to our own rules. Back home, I would consider people who behave like that as extremely impolite and our image in the valley is indeed quite questionable. It is quite possible that on this campus the culture shock is bigger for an Indian in his own country than for me from Germany. This seems rather odd. But of cause, after all I am not willing to give up the freedoms I have either. But maybe I should try to show more understanding for the other members of the community who struggle with these western freedoms and maybe these include the homophobic students I met. But after all should we be satisfied with tolerating each other? I think in order to have not only a functioning community but a good one, it is necessary that we all accept each other. But this is even harder to achieve. And you cannot force people to accept each other but you may be able to force people to tolerate each other. So should we force homophobic members of the community to tolerate homosexuals? To a certain extent we are already doing this but I am also forced to tolerate the homophobic students to a certain extent. I guess this is the secret of this diverse community, that we all demand from each other to tolerate us to a certain extent and hopefully we then meet somewhere in the middle and manage to live together.