The Salvation Army has long been a holy-day season fixture in front of my local supermarket, providing some Christmas sounds and cheer as it raises money to serve the poor. But when I went grocery shopping a couple of days ago, a difference was apparent: there was an SA volunteer and collection pot on the premises, but no trademark bell-ringing. So I asked the man why -- even though I already knew the answer.

You might have read the recent news stories concerning complaints about the SA bells. And, sure enough, the volunteer at my supermarket confirmed that these grinches' griping was the reason they'd been silenced. So now another element of the Christmas season is no more, at least in my area.

Of course, some may say that any continual noise can be irritating. But this raises questions: why didn't people seem to find the SA bells as annoying 25 years ago? Is it any coincidence that increasing irritation with them seems to hew closely with the growth of our society's secularist-grinch constituency?

It goes without saying that some people must have found the bells annoying decades ago as well. Most everything irks someone and everyone is irked by something (with me, it's the grating, purposeless noise emanating from liberals' mouths). Yet we tend to often tolerate things that annoy us, realizing that dealing with such comes with the territory of living among other beings. And tolerance is the relevant factor here because, clearly, it is only growing intolerance that could explain complaints intense enough to instigate the change in question.

Before proceeding, I'll point out that "tolerance" is almost universally misunderstood today. While we often conflate it with affection or sympathy, the word actually implies the abiding of a perceived negative. We wouldn't tolerate a fine car, delectable meal, or a beautiful work of art; we relish those things. But we would have to tolerate bad weather, a cold, or a Nancy Pelosi speech. Could you imagine someone asking not about pain, but "How much pleasure can you tolerate?"?

This explains why liberals fancy themselves the epitome of tolerance when they're anything but. They will point to their attitudes toward homosexual behavior, illegal entry into our country, and the exaltation of other cultures within our borders as prime examples of tolerance, but they're nothing of the sort. Liberals actually like or at least don't mind those things, which means that, by definition, they cannot be tolerant of them. Their affinity or indifference makes that impossible.

So how tolerant are liberals really? Well, just consider how they react to things they actually do perceive as negatives. How tolerant are they of conservative commentary, politically incorrect dissent on college campuses, or expressions of Christianity? Heck, anything that finds disfavor with a liberal sets off bells in his head.

Now, it's also true that what influences whether we perceive something as a negative or, at least, how tolerant of it we'll be, is the person or group with which it's associated. For example, we may discover that a habit we found intolerable in a person we disliked we find quite tolerable, or even endearing, in someone we like (I must confess to having once been guilty of this myself). Then we may realize it wasn't that the earlier individual was so intolerable; it's that we were unjustly intolerant and let our negative feelings for a person color our judgment of everything he did.

Liberals exhibit this all the time. They may detest former Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet, pointing out that 3000 people disappeared under his rule, while seeming not to bat an eye at Joseph Stalin's murder of tens of millions. They'll condemn Sarah Palin for supposedly using crosshairs imagery, but then say nothing about Barack Obama's statement, "If they [Republicans] bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." And they'll defend the broadcast of the Muslim call to prayer in Hamtramck, Michigan, while getting all bent out of shape over SA bells.

So it's clear that the main problem some people have with the SA bells is not the ringing, but who is doing the ringing. The Salvation Army is a Christian organization with a mission statement that reads, in part:

"[The SA] is an evangelical part of the universal Christian church. Its message is based on the Bible. Its ministry is motivated by the love of God. Its mission is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name without discrimination."

Christian, church, Bible, love of God, and Jesus Christ.... It's no wonder liberals perceive the SA as a negative.

Of course, this is just one little front in the War on Christmas. But now yet another element of the Yuletide season has been purged, thanks to the actions of liberals and inaction of yesterday's liberals (conservatives).

Ah, liberals, the very embodiment of negativity, negative about all the wrong things for more than 100 years.

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