The Things We Tolerate Today
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage" - Anaïs Nin
There are evils we condemn loudly. And there are evils we tolerate quietly.
The loud ones help us feel moral. The quiet ones reveal who we are.
We like to imagine that injustice persists because it is too complicated, too entrenched, too historical to undo. We tell ourselves that cruelty survives because it is powerful, because it has weapons, because it controls institutions. But that is only half the truth.
The other half is this: cruelty survives because we tolerate it.
Not because we are incapable of seeing it. Not because we cannot name it. But because confronting it would require courage — and courage is expensive. The women who denounced the abuses of a number of Hollywood producers and directors know this well.
We tolerate greed as if it were ambition. We tolerate the hoarding of wealth as if it were merit. We tolerate corporations that drain communities while calling it growth. We tolerate economic systems that depend on invisible labor, on migrant hands, on bodies that can be exploited without representation.
We tolerate it because it benefits the powerful. And we tolerate it because we are conditioned to do so.
We tolerate immigration enforcement practices that fracture families because they are framed as “law and order.” We tolerate racial profiling because it happens in neighborhoods we have already decided do not matter. We tolerate the normalization of cages, detention centers, and bureaucratic disappearance because they are wrapped in procedure and paperwork.
We tolerate institutional silence — from city halls, from churches, from universities — because those institutions protect their own stability first. We tolerate religious leaders who preach compassion but avoid proximity to suffering. We tolerate academic administrations that speak of diversity until they have to have skin in the game.
We tolerate it because stability feels safer than confrontation.
The truth is harder.
We tolerate evil because we lack the courage to stand up to those who commit it, profit from it, and require it to maintain their position. We tolerate it because challenging concentrated power threatens the small securities we believe to have carved out for ourselves. We tolerate it because it is easier to adjust to injustice than to destabilize the system that feeds us.
In Memphis, as in many American cities, this tolerance has become ambient. Federal forces operate. Communities adjust. Institutions measure their words. The press looks the other way. The machinery of enforcement hums along. And life continues — not because the injustice is invisible, but because it has been absorbed into routine.
That absorption is the real danger.
When greed becomes normal, it stops looking like violence. When exploitation becomes systemic, it stops looking like theft. When cruelty becomes bureaucratic, it stops looking like cruelty.
Tolerance, in this sense, is not virtue. It is adaptation. And adaptation to injustice is the quiet mark of our moral enslavement.
We often imagine moral collapse as dramatic — as riots, as chaos, as spectacle. But collapse is quieter than that. It looks like board meetings. It looks like careful statements. It looks like institutions choosing not to see what they already know. It looks like a society convincing itself that nothing is urgent enough to disrupt comfort and commerce.
It looks like people saying, “This is unfortunate,” instead of “This is wrong.”
It looks like the normalization of greed — not as vice, but as leadership. It looks like the consolidation of wealth — not as extraction, but as success. It looks like the imposition of the will of the rich — not as domination, but as governance.
The most dangerous tolerance is not the tolerance of difference. It is the tolerance of predation and the systems that protect it.
We have become fluent in tolerating what corrodes us.
We tolerate the concentration of power in fewer hands. We tolerate the erosion of rights when they are framed as security. We tolerate cruelty if it is procedural. We tolerate violence if it is institutional. We tolerate the quiet rewriting of norms because it happens incrementally, politely, legally.
And all the while, we tell ourselves that someone else will draw the line. But tolerance is itself a line. And every time we redraw it further back, the space for dignity shrinks.
There is a reason greed thrives. There is a reason authoritarian gestures gain traction. There is a reason vulnerable communities remain expendable. It is not only because the powerful are ruthless. It is because the rest of us don’t have the courage to collectively stand up to their ruthlessness.
We have tolerated it. Not always enthusiastically. Not always consciously. But sufficiently.
The contradiction of tolerance is this: the more we tolerate the evils that serve the powerful, the more power they accumulate — and the less space remains for anyone else to live with dignity.
We have mistaken endurance for virtue. We have mistaken civility for morality. We have mistaken stability for justice. And perhaps the hardest truth to face is this: we are not collapsing because we do not know better. We are collapsing because we do — and choose comfort over courage.
The things we tolerate today are the shape of the world we will inhabit tomorrow.
That is not prophecy.
It is arithmetic.
