Cancel Culture drips easily from the tongue of the person being canceled. The taste might be unfamiliar, unlike anything she’d ever spoken, yet the familiar disdain is there— the dismissive tone that blames the reaction and not the action that first moved the culture to call for ‘canceling’.
Cancel Culture is a way for the powerful, the bad, and the good actors to look outside of themselves, to aim accountability away from self and towards the crowd. But ‘canceling’ someone or something should be the consumers’ prerogative. Shouldn’t it?
Yet, it can reach too far. it can extend its grip beyond the ask. It can cause outrage where a simple apology would suffice. It can explode the small flame until there is a wildfire, an all-encompassing heat that scorched anyone or thing that comes beside it.
Yet Still, it’s not truly defined. To cancel someone is simply to withhold support and to encourage others to withhold support.
Yet Even Still, the question of change as it relates to Cancel Culture is unanswered. That is, can people change? And more specifically, can their ideas change?
What about self-examination?
What about it?
Can we not see our own faults?
Are we so quick to jump to conclusions about who a person is, based on a bad decision that they made?
Is ‘canceling’ someone bad?
It still may Yet be, though we cannot start discarding people at the first hint of impropriety. Under different circumstances, we may find ourselves in the shoe of the person we seek to ‘cancel’.
Not acknowledging our own propensity to become the person we seek to ‘cancel’ is to grow our shadow selves in the process of condemning others.
Therefore, the answer to limit the so-called cancel culture is to use empathy. As we may very well find ourselves in the shoe of the person being canceled. Though we must also advocate accountability.
There are places where empathy does not come into play, as the ‘canceling’ is not at issue. Areas, where we as a society have deemed the action so abhorrent that the need for self-reflection is so secondary as to make it irrelevant.
Poor NoName.
