This cancel culture crap (and that’s exactly what it is) is making me sick. It’s destroying democracy under our noses. The only cancellation the cancel culture cops need to stop is their own bullying. And if they refuse, it’s up to the rest of us make our voices heard.
If progressives hate Dr. Seuss, Curious George, and Mr. Potato Head and love athletes who hate America, democracy holds that I have no right to interfere with their views. But the opposite also holds true. I don’t need the Progressive Police to tell me how to think.
If progressives don’t like Dr. Seuss or Curious George they don’t have to read those books and if enough people agree, the books will fade away. If they don’t want to play with Mr. Potato Head, because he’s a Mr., they can buy their own generic potato and make it into any gender (or into French fries) but it’s not their right to demand that a well-known, loved toy be taken off of the shelves because of a gender “issue”.
Just as I don’t have the bullish right to tell others what to think for me to “feel safe”, the cancel culture cops don’t have the right to tell me what to read, watch, believe, hire, fire, or have children play with to make them “feel safe”. If we don’t feel safe, it’s up to us to turn off or away from what feels unsafe, not to impose our values on someone who makes us feel unsafe (which rarely works) or upon a manufacturer of whatever the prevailing political pressure deems unsafe.
If conservatives were to demand that progressives adhere to conservative beliefs or be canceled, by being shamed, shunned and fired, conservatives would be cancelled faster than you could say mashed potato. So why should the opposite position be acceptable?
Edmund Burke was the first to say that when good [people] do nothing, evil flourishes. Bullying, for any reason, even disguised as a safety issue, is oppressively evil. Silence to evil is assent. Assent ushers in tyranny.
Once that happens, “there goes the neighborhood” of tolerance that we’ve known as democracy.
Image by Markus Winkler from Pixabay
