As a regular idiosyncratic person, I'm full of contradictions. For one, I struggle with posting my opinion in the social media sphere because I don't want to add to the endless over-sharing of polarizing opinions. And yet, here I'm writing this blog.
I think I'm a walking target to cancel culture, and I believe I haven't been canceled yet only because of my irrelevance. However, I have been misunderstood many times because of my many all-human contradictions. Being misunderstood, or sometimes flatly ignored, is what you get when people don't know what to do about you or get anything out of it.
But trouble starts when you stop being ignored. People always seek some sort of confirmation before deciding to take a position. If the "right people" hit the like button, their followers will do the same. If they leave a hate comment, for sure more will come!
To me, that's how "cancel culture" starts. One day, entirely by chance, someone finds a post from another individual, who may have been once relatively famous but left to oblivion since then. This post, written in a different time and context, suddenly is propelled to notoriety, and bang! The cancel culture machine is triggered and the poor fellow, who was pretty much forgotten, is again infamously famous. So what was the post about? It can be anything, but it usually is a stupid and unsolicited joke or remark about a film, celebrity, or whatever.
Of course, sometimes it is a more significant transgression, or it comes from a well-known bully who received a free pass in another time but now is taking the hit of the cultural shift. I'm thinking of people like some famous chatty so-called supermodel or reality star turned politician– you know who they are. Bullies should not be tolerated for sure, but calling out and canceling people won't promote understanding or healing.
Like Prof. Loretta J. Ross wrote in her 2020 article in the New York Times, "calling out assumes the worst. Calling in involves conversation, compassion, and context. It doesn't mean a person should ignore harm, slight or damage, but nor should she, he or they exaggerate it."
There will always be bullies and haters. Still, my point is nobody is safe in a society that, while going under its own reckoning, it's willing to burn their "witches" in public as an act of contrition.
We all make mistakes, and these days we all make mistakes in the most public way possible. Our footprint is out there, living receipts that anyone can bring up and rub to your face at any point. And our innate contradictions that once expressed perhaps the moment or the stage of evolution of our own personalities now can haunt us to eternity.
We are living in a moment when much has been said about minorities finally breaking the ceiling. But little has been said about everybody's glass ceiling. As a result, throwing stones at other people's glass ceilings became a form of entertainment, or sometimes worse, the means of self-promotion. People are eager to be noticed; one hate post might be one step away from social media notoriety. It's just like a twist to Andy Warhol's prophetic statement about being famous for 15 minutes. Today, it seems more like everybody will be canceled for 15 minutes. Or longer.