There’s nothing that I hate more in this world than cancel culture.
I believe wholeheartedly that a world divided by harsh moral judgements based on simple mistakes is not a world benefiting anyone living in it.
That being said, I do not believe we should excuse terrible behavior or repeated offenders of terrible acts. I mean the people we interact with in our own daily lives, who said something that they maybe shouldn’t have said, or maybe they made a mistake and wronged you in the past, and have apologized and changed their mindset or actions for the better. That is where we as humans need to exercise our empathy and grace.
Empathy is the most important part of the human experience, in my humble opinion. With the rise of cancel culture, and everyone being on high moral alert to await who’s going to catch them at the wrong time or say the wrong thing does not allow for empathy to grow or be nurtured. Yes, I do believe society needs moral guidelines to hold people to, but each individual person is living their own separate life aside from your own, and has different lived experiences that will allow them to believe one way or another about different things.
An example of this would be someone making an out-of-place and offensive comment to another person. The second person is clearly offended by this and judges person one’s entire moral character on this one comment. But what they don’t know or understand is that the first person made a comment that they grew up saying all the time, and no one had ever told them that it was offensive. This is a situation where you would exercise empathy to understand that the first person made an honest mistake, and you would give them the grace to learn and do better next time.
It’s a gift to have a lot of empathy towards other people, and it’s a gift to feel so much for other people. To be sensitive about the world is to be alive as a person. It’s a gift to feel things deeply and to have empathy for other people in a way that truly puts you in the place and position of other people. It’s a gift to have grace for people for being human, and to forgive when you feel wronged. It’s something I think our world could benefit from. We are here in this world to love ourselves and the people living here on Earth, and with that comes understanding the common human experience.