Marc Elliot challenges XU students to practice tolerance

Marc Elliot discussed the importance of tolerance and acceptance in his presentation "What Makes You Tic" on March 16. Elliot is a 25 year-old alumnus of Washington University who had originally intended to take a year off before going to medical school, but has now become a public speaker focusing on the topic of tolerance and acceptance. Elliot was born with a disease that left him with four feet of intestines, as opposed to the normal 20. At the age of five, Elliot started exhibiting symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome, and at the age of nine, was diagnosed with mild Tourette's. Tourette's causes a person to have "tics" – vocal or physical uncontrolled actions such as head shaking, "barking" or saying random words. Elliot compared his tics to an itch that remains until you scratch it, only in his case, he has an urge to do something and this urge is not relieved until that action is done. "I have no control over the itch, that's involuntary, but I do have voluntary control over scratching it. Tourette's is like having ten or 15 or 20 itches all in one spot, so I can stand here and choose not to scratch it, but it just builds and builds until I have to scratch it," said Elliot. Elliot's tics started with excessive blinking and moved onto saying things repeatedly and at inappropriate times such as "excuse me" or "I love you." As Elliot got older, his tics grew increasingly worse. In middle school, he began to violently whip his head to the left and say inappropriate words, including curse word and racial slurs. "This is by far the worst part about my Tourette's. Not only do I say things that are hard to control, these are things that I don't feel on the inside," said Elliot. "Another reason I do this is I have something called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. What happens is that when I walk into a situation, I will think to myself, what is the riskiest thing that I can do or say and that becomes my itch." Elliot says that, at the age of 25, his Tourette's is now the best that it has ever been. Elliot expressed at the beginning of the presentation that he did not want to lecture the audience on the definitions of tolerance and acceptance, and wanted to instead express their importance through personal experience. At the beginning of the presentation, Elliot also handed out 25 slips of paper with sayings such as "say the vowel E" or "moo like a cow" along with a number. Throughout his presentation, Elliot asked the students with these slips to follow the directions on the card during the time slot they were given in order to allow them to see what it feels like to have Tourette's. Elliot also shared various personal stories where he has encountered people who were intolerant or simply did not understand him, including a Greyhound bus driver who refused to let him ride the bus because of a racial slur he had ticked. He also did a social experiment where he gave everyone in the audience ten seconds to create their own tic and act on it. "Even though I stood up here and gave you all permission to have Tourette's, and you all knew that the person next to you also had permission, a lot of you did not tic," said Elliot. "I hope that gave you a little insight to what is it like living with Tourette's – how embarrassing it can be. What I hope that all of you can take away from that is that most of you in this room have the choice. You had the choice to tic or not to tic." Following the experiment, Elliot described the difference between tolerance and acceptance. "Tolerance is the bare minimum of how we should treat someone and acceptance is the thing we all might want to aspire to. In my life, over the past 20 years, I have found that there are so many people that don't even meet that basic threshold of tolerance and I really believe that if you want to be that accepting person, you have to have a strong foundation of being tolerant," said Elliot. Through Elliot's use of personal experience, audience involvement and charisma, he was able to express his desire for a more tolerant country. He stressed that he wanted people to live by the idea of simply "live and let live." "When a person is being intolerant, he or she is usually making many assumptions about somebody else and then they decide to turn their assumptions into an action," said Elliot. "These people let their lack of understanding of someone else's life dictate their own actions and they choose to not live and let live."