Tolerance Isn’T Found In Uniforms

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? … Or does it explode?

Harlem, by Langston Hughes

At my old grade school, Saint Augustine, we all wore uniforms. We wore them to save our mothers from doing too much laundry and our fathers from working too much overtime. But mostly, I think, we wore them to make us all seem the same.

In fourth grade a new girl came to our school. She had huge, bulging eyes, cloudy like those of a dead fish. The kids called her Fish Eyes. She was a quiet girl, not wanting to call any more attention to herself than those eyes already invited. She was skilled in the art of becoming invisible. I can still see her standing alone on the outskirts of the playground, kicking at imaginary leaves, the collar of her blue coat drawn up against the cold. I don’t think there was ever a coat made that could warm that kind of loneliness.

At my old high school, Marycliff, we all wore uniforms. In my class there was a shy, fat girl who perennially smelled of sweat and fried onions. She, too, was given her own cruel nicknames, but nobody called her those things to her face. Nobody called her at all. I can still see her trying to squeeze in and out of the desks, hugging her sweater around her like a shield. I don’t think there was ever a sweater made that could dull that kind of anguish.

Both of these girls presumably had dreams, maybe grand ones, maybe humble. But among them was undoubtedly the simple wish to be treated with plain kindness. Both shriveled from the lack of it.

What happens to a raisin in the sun? It dries up or it explodes.

Like my two childhood classmates, the killers of Littleton — Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris — were outcasts. And one day, the outcasts exploded. In the weeks following that horror, we’ve speculated on how such a thing could happen. Fingers point in every direction; some of them point directly at us.

We’re a country that sometimes cherishes our freedoms more than we understand the responsibility of having them. We insist on our right to carry weapons but are horrified when those weapons fall into the wrong hands. We demand freedom of expression but are shocked that some of those expressions are brimming with hate. We espouse that all people are created equal but learn, even as young children, that people are not treated equally. Or in some cases, even humanely.

This is not to suggest that had their classmates been kinder, the outcasts might not have killed them. The reasons behind that decision are buried with the boys and their victims. Some people implode on themselves and some explode against others. Some endure every kind of humiliation and grow strong at the broken places. Others just remain broken. And some of the broken ones kill.

For our part, we’ve considered that guns and explosives may be too easy to acquire; that movies, video games and television too often glorify killing; that the Internet is beginning to look like Pandora’s box. We even concede that some of our adult freedoms may be costing children their childhood. And for all the ideas we’ve come up with, the explanations that flit around the inexplicable, there’s one thing we don’t talk about much. And that’s the high cost we pay for being an exclusive rather than inclusive nation.

Every time a person becomes isolated from others, something is lost in both the individual and the group. For the individual, there’s the loss of fellowship, the inability to express and contribute what is uniquely his or her own. If this happens early enough in life and continues, the results can range anywhere from sad to catastrophic.

The group members suffer this loss, however unaware they may be of it. But the greater loss is the opportunity to practice inclusive tolerance. A tolerance that is compassionate enough to accept and nurture individuality and wise enough to recognize pathology.

Whether the disenfranchised dry up or explode has got to matter to us. Inclusive tolerance is not just the “right” thing to do, it’s increasingly the sane thing to do.

In my old schools, we wore uniforms to make us all seem the same. But we were not the same and everybody knew it. Nobody talked about it, not the teachers, not the parents and certainly not us kids. Some of us were the bullies, some of us were bullied. And some of us stood on the playground or sat in our desks and said nothing.