June 2006

Recently, George W. Bush, the president of the United States, addressed the country on the topic of illegal immigration. It’s time. According to a recent Gallup poll (April 7-9, 2006),

• 81% of Americans believe that illegal immigration is “out of control.”
• 96% believe that controlling U.S. borders to halt the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S. is important.
• 48% think building a wall along our border is a good idea.
• 60% think we should deny illegal immigrants access to schools and hospitals.
• 81% say we should significantly increase the number of officers patrolling our borders.
• 84% want to institute tough penalties for businesses who employ illegals.

The president has authorized the use of the National Guard to secure the border with Mexico. While the president has many critics on this issue, even in his own party, his administration has not been inert in responding to illegal immigration. According to the White House,

• Since President Bush took office, funding for border security has increased by 66 percent.
• The Border Patrol has expanded to more than 12,000 agents, an increase of more than 2,700 agents, or nearly 30 percent. The president’s FY07 budget funds another 1,500 new agents.
• Agents are being provided with cutting-edge technology like infrared cameras, advanced motion sensors, and unmanned aerial vehicles. Protective infrastructure, such as vehicle barriers and fencing in urban areas, is being installed.
  

Part 1: How Did We Get Here from There?

Since 1896, when the Ochs-Sulzberger family took over the ownership of the New York Times, a curious little motto has been printed on the masthead of what is arguably the United States’ most influential daily newspaper. “All the News That’s Fit to Print” is a statement of both arrogance and intent of this historic journalistic medium.

But a lot has changed since 1896. For that matter, a lot has changed since 1996. Enter the Internet, and from the Internet has grown the blogosphere. The blogosphere is a rather crude title for the arena in which citizen journalists now have access to a huge readership that trolls through cyberspace, landing on websites and blogs like bumblebees landing on daisies. Internet visitors scurry from site to site with attention spans that make a hamster look like a three-toed sloth. Often driven to their destinations by the monster search engines owned by Yahoo and Google, some stay for a few seconds. Others perch and hang out for hours. With a few well-placed words in the Google box, we can find history, background, news, gossip, and garbage on anyone or anything in just a few mouse clicks.

The world, from schools of journalism to the legal profession, is still trying to figure out how to respond to this new form of information exchange. The rules aren’t the same for Internet bloggers and sites as they are for print and broadcast media. Spreading a falsehood can be a career-ender in the mainstream media—think Dan Rather. On the Internet, a falsehood just adds to the mystique and interest. Think Matt Drudge.
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Tolerance has become a shibboleth in contemporary American society. We are constantly harangued to exhibit tolerance toward all manner of differences. Nothing is less stylish than to assert some belief as absolute, except perhaps to treat that absolute as the basis of a moral judgment. To be sure of one’s moral base—and to censure someone else’s conduct as immoral—is to be judged guilty of hate and phobia.

Of course, this pretense of tolerance is the merest hypocrisy. Nobody is willing to tolerate absolutely every idea and every activity. Those who prattle most about tolerance have also become the most notorious for imposing draconian speech and conduct codes. It turns out that speech Nazis do believe in absolutes, and they are willing to enforce their absolutes in obviously coercive ways.

The truth is that unbounded tolerance is neither possible nor desirable. Nobody—absolutely nobody—believes that tolerance can exist without limitation. Sooner or later, everyone bumps up against something intolerable and hateful. Pedophilia, genocide, gang rape, torturing children: something is wrong with a person who cannot hate these acts. Only a moral nitwit would want to tolerate them.

The question is not whether we ought to be intolerant, but when. How do we know what should be tolerated and what should not? Several observations help to answer this question, but one in particular is the subject of the present discussion.
That observation is that tolerance is not the same as agreement. One need not necessarily support or agree with everything that one tolerates. Contrapositively, disagreement does not necessarily constitute intolerance.
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