I ask you, Can’t we cancel cancel culture? Can’t we just go back to the early days of our lives? The simpler times. Times when friendships were built on sharing a juice box at lunch or building blocks during free time and taking turns going down the slide at recess. Times when we were taught that disagreements could be solved with an “I’m sorry” and a high five or a handshake.
When did the things that we don’t see eye-to-eye on become a conduit for imploding relationships … abandoning friendships … and destroying the sense of camaraderie that our shared humanity demands of us?
I’m not trying to oversimplify something that is quite the opposite – incredibly complex. We have gotten ourselves wound up, bound up into a system where we are more than happy to annihilate people who don’t agree with us; where we are more than ready with a swipe of the screen and a tap of keys without rebound, to rally others to band together to deem someone else’s opinions, blasphemous. Someone else’s mistakes, fodder. Someone else’s beliefs too far on the other end of the political spectrum for our own tolerance.
In her new song “CANCELLED!” Taylor Swift says, “You thought that it would be okay, at first / The situation could be saved, of course / But they’d already picked out your grave and hearse / Beware the wrath of masked crusaders …”
How brazen we’ve become from behind the thinly veiled screen that cracks open into real life, carelessly throwing the carcasses of human connection into the wasteland.
Making a discovery about a friend’s political persuasions was once akin to realizing that someone was a vegetarian or didn’t like olives on their pizza or would rather spend a vacation on the beach, instead of in the mountains. None of these qualities changed who that person had always been to us before we realized that we differed in our taste in music or movie genres or thought the dress was blue-black instead of white-gold. The reality is – people don’t suddenly go from being a terrific friend to a terrible friend overnight because we found out that we differ in opinions. Such a discovery is simply a data point in growing alongside another human.
Another layer of the onion.
Now, I’m certainly not implying that every relationship should exist in a perpetual state of kumbaya. I’ve been called many things in my life, and Pollyanna is certainly one of them. And, even Pollyanna had to come to terms with the reality that sometimes, the glad game was missing too many pieces to be played. There are ethical thresholds that we each aren’t willing to cross; choices that friends make that feel too far outside of our own value-sets to keep going. Relationships that seek to push us in directions that grate against our respective moral compasses. There is a time and place for the dissolution of a friendship. But, not the dissolution of a person.
When it comes to disagreements, when did we lose the ability to engage in civil conversations … civil discord? The power of a debate where both parties, at the end, shake hands and move on. Cancel culture stunts our growth, our evolution. It mutes the opportunity to try on someone else’s perspective for a moment in an effort to understand their thoughts and ideas – the place from which they are coming in their own individual viewpoints. Perhaps, if given daylight and a bit of oxygen, it makes us stronger and more resolute in our own beliefs? Or, perhaps there’s a slight chance that it gives us perspective as a means of balancing out our own opinions to deepen our well of empathy and compassion when it comes to holding space for the feelings, thoughts and ideologies of others.
The masked crusader of cancel culture is ready to weaponize and pulverize. But, if we respond by laying down our swords and silencing the chaos – the likes, the follows and unfollows, the curated content created only to rile our sensibilities and place us on a path of vengeance – perhaps we have a chance of at least staving off the cataclysmic crash course of cancellation that, in the end, will inevitably come for each of us.
