Acceptance

Not Edited

                I took the time in my last blog to discuss a South Park episode, and I am doing it for this blog as well, as I believe it is one of the best mediums for controversial discussion that we currently have in television right now. The episode I am going to be referring to is “The Death Camp of Tolerance” episode, which if you haven’t seen is entirely about intolerance. On some points I may be playing Devil’s advocate, as I often do, and others I will agree with the majority of society’s view. While nearly the entire episode is filled with stereotypes, racist innuendos, and what could be considered harmful portrayals of minorities and other people, it does not fail at bringing up numerous informative and thoughtful points as to the good and bad of these when thought about.

When the children are taken to the Museum of Tolerance in the episode, they are shown all kinds of negative and positive stereotypes and how such beliefs can cause harmful prejudices in people. It’s interesting to see that at the same time these things are usually negative things are being shown, they are being constantly skewed to be funny and enjoyable for the audience to watch. This brings me to one of two points I want to make. The first is that I see so many people up in arms against media when a certain religion, gender, culture is picked on through humor and I don’t find this fair. What gives any idea the right to be above being degraded in some way. By pointing out for example a minority and saying we should not be allowed to make jokes of it, are we not just patronizing that minority and in a way, ourselves, saying that said minority is flawed and should be lifted up through the exemption of being ill-treated at the hands of comedians, that they should be treated better than so-called ‘normal’. This idea just does not seem right to me. I will accommodate the other side of this argument, by agreeing that crude and unreasonable treatment and bashing of cultures, races, sexes, (etc.) for no other reason than to put them down is wrong, truly wrong and should not be conducted as it can reinforce hurtful beliefs among unknowing people. That being said, I do not believe that we should solely look to our sources of media expecting them to solely produce media that is in no way controversial and entirely acceptable by all people as it is not likely to happen ever. I honestly find this as a lazy and wasteful idea when it is taken to the extreme that absolutely all media should be acceptable. Is it not more reasonable to focus on educating ourselves of the truths behind the minorities we see on TV? Should we not take the time to understand what they truly are through exploration of the world the actually live in and the study of cultures that we do not understand? As a people we should be more open minded and understanding of the fact that what is displayed to us through TV is not often the entire truth and we should not base our views solely off such ideas.

This directly leads to my next point that the feeling that everything needs to be acceptable and ok. It’s not always a bad thing to see the fault in something. A monologue in the episode states, acceptance isn’t what we should strive for as total acceptance of everything is not something we will ever achieve. We should strive for tolerance. As a character in the episode phrases it, “You tolerate a crying child sitting next to you on an airplane, or you tolerate a bad cold. It can still piss you off.” There should be a point when we stop simply trying to accept everything and tolerate it as a part of the world we live in and be willing to coexist with it.