Coexistence is not the absence of disagreement; it is the decision to live with disagreement without turning the other person into an enemy. Perhaps, after 25 years, this is one of the most important things we can learn from 9/11: that the opposite of hatred is not indifference, but an ethical commitment to living together. An ethical life begins when we stop seeing the others as strangers and recognise them as human beings.
What a great way to end the piece by Sirwan Barzanji.
It’s called the Enlightenment and it the outcome of 300 years of war
but there was a group of extremists who did not believe in tolerance and they went to America where they could be as intolerant as they liked
they also changed the meaning of the word tolerance to mean abiding something you hate rather than being a principle where you abide everything
This is something that seems to be the mindset in Japan.
The second last paragraph was pretty powerful too:
We arrived in Australia about two years ago, and we found it a welcoming country. What I have learnt in this short time is that our multicultural society is an imperfect experiment in living with difference. Its success does not depend upon eliminating cultural, religious or political disagreement. It depends upon whether we can transform difference from a source of fear into an ordinary feature of shared civic life. We need the passion to resist injustice, the courage to confront violence, and the imagination to see beyond the categories that divide us.
Yeah, actually this paragraph is what made me pay a little more attention to the writer. Seems theres a story there in itself.
