Intolerant Tolerance

Tolerant:  Tending to permit, understand, allow, or accept something.

As I whipsaw back and forth between tolerance and intolerance some oldies but goodies try to worm their way into my dark and cobwebby awareness . . . 

We love people for who they are, not for who we want them to be.

I'm encouraged to think of someone I love, someone I know well, someone I see often but don't know at all, and someone who really sticks in my craw.  After I ponder each person for a minute I say these affirmations:
May you be happy.
May you be healthy and well.
May you be free from mental and physical suffering.
May you be . . .  something or the other.  Hang on - gotta look this one up.

May you live without fear and have peace in all ways.

And from the inventory part of The Program at the spot where we are contemplating how to deal with some asshole who desperately needs to have the shit choked out of him:
"This was our course:  We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick.  Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too.  We asked god to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.  When a person offended we said to ourselves, 'This is a sick man.  How can I be helpful to him?"

This is pretty good stuff.  I like the general tone but I'm a little uncomfortable as to how it sort of implies that I'm in the right and the other guy isn't.   While it's somewhat generous to add the adverb "perhaps" when describing the nature of the other person's spiritual problem, I'd suggest that we also could have implied perhaps the other person was reacting to our own not inconsiderable dickishness.  Our founder also stuck in the intimation that "like ourselves" others may be spiritually sick.  Yeah, well, I'm going to stick in the other intimation that we're pretty messed up as a general rule.

Isn't there also a paragraph that says that we triumphantly seize on the shortcomings of others to avoid looking at our own flaws?

Lots of good stuff to help me validate all of my sins and inadequacies.