What is "Cancel Culture"?

Cancel Culture, better known as cutting toxic people out of your life… There’s a lot of subjectivity in that sentence, even if you don’t think so. Granted, while there are people you do and don’t need to be around (I won’t concede that point), I didn’t require much research to come to the conclusion. Cancel Culture is, at it’s simplest form, removing someone from a group (often times society as a whole), and I’ll be explaining just why it does much more harm than good. Firstly though, using elements from the “Propaganda Universe” is never a good idea.

Cancellation, better known as forcing people from their social homes seems to be taking precedence over “I think X, so I’ll say X.”, primarily by the usage of microaggressions (eg addressing a male/female group as “Guys”, devolving who gets to start a game of chess into an argument about race) and the fact that they exist as a way of backing up one’s argument. I’d also like to take this time to say that going back through decades of documents to find something for the sake of distortion and removal from context. Often times, when we do this, we’re doing it to people of logic, rather than people of emotion. When we remove these people from society and consistently ignore them, it becomes not only survival of the fittest for those canceled, but an erosion of societal progress, quite possibly to result in stagnation.

When I mentioned “Survival of the Fittest” earlier, I don’t mean it in the way that only the strongest people who don’t get killed when getting the crap beat out of them survives. Rather, I’m talking from a standpoint of mental health. Being “Canceled” can result in a number of mental conditions that would, otherwise, likely have never appeared. Depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and actions of self-harming. While I do agree that the Cancelers have the right to set their own boundaries, essentially freezing public opinion of the Canceled in time likely isn’t the way to go. Explaining the general concept of this would involve the creation of a second society (I know I’m sounding like a conspiracist here, but stay with me) where the canceled can live, which does happen on a small scale in some cases, but mostly, this doesn’t happen like this. It normally ends up with the total destruction of one’s life, with the Canceler justifying it with the out-of-context data.

Stagnation of Society as a whole would likely be impeded when capable minds are thrown out. We lose the capability of formulating new ideas to help us, leaving us with only the minds who support canceling anyone who has opposing opinions, facts, or ideas. Reading the reports that I have on the internet has made me come to understand just how terrible of a society that we’ve allowed ourselves to create and fall into: In order to be accepted, you keep your head down and suppress what makes you you. In allowing your ideas, thoughts, and expressions to be known, or even leaving a papertrail, you’re allowing yourself to be canceled. The only way around this would be to somehow read the canceler’s minds so you could prevent going through this process, albeit at the cost of losing your individuality. The idea behind cancel culture is simple: Conform or Leave.

Put simply, I do believe that everyone has the right to set their own boundaries, but the do not have the right to ruin someone else’s life because they want to remove context and distort facts.

One Report of Cancel Culture

A Tale From Small Town, USA

I grew up in a small town, and I'm still living there, though I can guarantee that the majority of my readers would never have guessed. Everyone knows everyone, the local newspaper is only 50¢, and (at the risk of making a bad joke), word spreads faster than COVID-19. As of typing this article, I'm currently at one such byproduct called The Taste of Cherokee, a Veteran’s memorial event that's catered by most (if not all), of the restaurants in the county. One thing I have to say about small-town food is that there's none like it.

Come here on a Sunday after church and prove me wrong, I dare you.

Anyway, I could go on and on about good food, but there's more to the scope of this. In a small town, there's a sense of community... Then there’s the author of this article sitting at the table in the back typing on a phone held together by tape. Kudos if you can call me out by that. Still, you feel like you know everyone, and you know just where everything is and who everyone is. Over the course of a few minutes, I quickly found more people I had interacted with in the past than not.

The name “Smalltown, USA” can mean a plethora of things. To Little Billy, it can mean the park he and his friends spend all day playing at. To the mother, it means the Sunday Service. To the father, it means the old dirt road he learned to drive on. Put simply, it means something unique to everyone, tomboy and city-dweller alike. No two people have the same definition because no two people have the same experience.

The song America the Beautiful was played, and I can easily pin this as the best analogy. I play the song slowly and with feeling on the piano, pouring my heart and soul into it. The performer, Chad Steed, played it equally as personal on a guitar. Two people, one story, one piece, two experiences.

While I don’t consider myself to be from Smalltown, USA, there's no doubt that it would be certain that I would have met this place in my lifetime, even briefly. It’s a place where there aren’t any big Hollywood stars, it's a place where people are simply people… And that's okay. Smalltown, USA isn't about needing to know everything and being 100% self-sufficient, it’s a place where help is always close by if you need a dollar or a nice place to lay your head at night.
Sometimes in the modern world, we can forget to slow down and sip the coffee. Most of my time off, I'm treating McDonald's like a trendy Big Apple coffee shop, sipping on a good ten-n-ten (You know it’s good coffee if it needs ten cream/ten sugar to fight the stoutness).

Throughout the evening, I had many revelations and, to my own surprise, a few times tears almost surfaced. Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I don’t generally let the waterworks on unless there’s a big reason- then I excuse myself and hope I didn’t make myself a spectacle. As a measure to hopefully get off of this tangent I am now on, the revelation that stood out to me the most was that, as much as I don’t fit the default image (I prefer that term as opposed to the much-more-familiar stereotype), I am from Smalltown, USA.

Now, on a more serious note:-
To my American readers, both at home and abroad, as we remember Veteran’s day this November, and even as we remember the victims of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in a couple of days, we needn’t forget the brave men and women that gave the ultimate sacrifice in order to make possible what we enjoy today. To anyone who served to protect our land at any point in history, it wouldn’t have been possible without you and what you gave.