[Ed: This was originally written in a discussion about the vampire community, but the concepts apply equally well elsewhere]

So, now we've seen some examples of "I'm Real, You're Not" and some examples of "Can't We All Just Get Along?" I've been thinking about how to keep this tangle from shattering us the way it does so many communities, and I came up with three different tools we might be able to use.

Tolerance - So far, we've been pretty good at Tolerance. Tolerance is a social contract - people come together and say, "Look, I don't understand some of you, but I'll take your word for it that you belong." It's an external framework that we voluntarily plug into in the hope of finding SOME common ground to build on. Being external, it doesn't require any internal cognitive dissonance - Sue can think Ellen isn't a real vampire, but just kind of deal with the fact that Ellen thinks she is because Ellen, like anyone else, probably has some interesting things to say.

Respect - Respect is the most stable and reliable tool for community- building, but it's totally different from Tolerance because it's completely internal. You respect some people, you don't respect others. You can TREAT people you don't respect as though you respect them, if you've got the personal strength for that sort of thing, but most people don't, and write it off as "hypocrisy" because they've got so much to prove that they can't just let it go. The important thing is that you can't just decide to respect someone, any more than you can decide to love them or hate them, because it's a feeling. Until someone has *earned* your respect, you can't genuinely respect them. Respect is rare, and rightly so.

So how do you bridge the gap between the inherent tensions of diverse people practicing Tolerance, and the rarity of Respect?

Courtesy! I know, it seems too simple and old-fashioned to be at all useful - but it really does have meaning, and could save us as a community if enough individuals decide to use it. It's not completely external, like Tolerance - no matter what community you're a part of or not, it's totally up to you whether to treat your fellows with courtesy. Neither is it totally internal, like Respect - it's kind of a programming language that translates between the machine language of what you really feel and the outside world with its possibilities for functionality.

A nice perk of Courtesy is that it actually leads to Respect. A lot of times, Respect is hindered by personal insecurity and lack of information. But if you get a critical mass of diverse people practicing Courtesy, the flow of information is unimpeded, and people are more likely to shrug off the capes & masks and allow as how maybe someone totally different from them might be for real too.