Canceling Cancel Culture
Cancel culture has always been around, but in different variations for obvious reasons. However, ever since social media became a thing, it has sky-rocketed. And even more so when we found ourselves stuck at home, only able to connect with one another through a screen. It’s a LOT easier to type your woes and complaints than it is to say them face to face. Hence the creation of a new era of cancel culture. A faceless cancel culture, where no one is protected nor truly understood.
If you think about it, canceling someone doesn’t exactly solve a problem. Yes, sure there are reasons to cancel someone for horrific things they have done or lack of even trying to better themselves. For example, Harvey Weinstein? Yes, cancel. Jeffrey Epstein? Cancel, cancel, cancel. If it’s true that Armie Hammer does in fact eat people - prooooobably OK to go ahead and cancel him too haha. BUT then there are people being canceled for things they did/said maybe 5-10 years ago. Or just being canceled because they said something offensive without really knowing it (due to privilege, head in the sand, what have you) and instead of us educating a person and taking our time to help them understand why what they said was hurtful/incorrect/offensive - we just write them off. I mean, it does sound a whole lot easier honestly, but then again who benefits from that? Are we all so sure to believe that we are completely perfect in our past, present, future selves, that we can point the finger at someone else rest assured that it will never come back to us? That we’ll never be caught with our foot in our mouth? Tell you what, I sure as hell am not.
I’m not sure if anyone really remembers, but “that’s gay” used to be a very popular expression. And for the most part, when people said it they were just trying to say something was stupid or lame. Yeah - it’s pretty effed up that you’d equate gay with lame, but it was a saying that went around for some time. I don’t like it about myself, but I too said it numerous times. You can go back even further when kids would constantly say “no homo” when they were offering a compliment to someone of the same sex, but didn’t want to be misconstrued as hitting on them. Yeah, it’s cringey and it’s bad. But we learned! We opened our ears and had some brave souls come forward and really explain the sexuality spectrum and fluidity that we have all come to know and understand present day. And we can continue to do that for all topics that aren’t quite normalized yet. If American history has taught us anything, it’s that we are wrong a LOT of the time, but we are also very capable of adapting, learning, and growing. If we canceled every single person for something they mistakenly said or possibly done, we’d have no more people left on this planet. Plain and simple.
Then there are the people that exclaim “you can’t say anything anymore!” or that everything is so “PC” now - well quite frankly they are correct. But it’s not just that you can’t, it’s that we learned that our words hold meaning. That it isn’t OK to ridicule or knock someone down just for doing something differently or for the sake of what you think is funny. The majority of us have learned that we all hold a common ground and are equals no matter gender, race, sexuality, political preference, etc. We are all human.
Cancel culture is very black and white thinking. All or nothing. You are either completely perfect in yourself and thinking, or you made a mistake and can never change as a human and that is always how you will think. Put simply though, that’s not how life really is. If I’ve learned anything in my short time here, it’s that none of us are perfect. None of us know the answers or hold all the knowledge. But as long as we leave our hearts open and constantly growing, educating, and changing, we can come very close to being imperfectly perfect. It seems as though we’ve been stuck in this mentality as a whole that opinions are facts. That opinions make up the whole of the person and that isn’t true. Our morals, our character, and what we give to the world makes up who we are. Therefore, we shouldn’t be canceling each other before we offer grace and knowledge. We shouldn’t be able to shut people down so quickly behind a faceless mob. Hate begets hate.
