Memo from NYC

There's a lot of buzz these days in the media (social and otherwise) about "cancel culture." I honestly don't know what it is and how it's precisely defined -- if it means people getting fired, blacklisted, smeared, or otherwise publicly shamed and made unemployable and friendless, possibly homeless and destitute, then it's nothing new. You can go back to the days of the Salem Witch Trials, or more recently McCarthyism, to see "cancel culture" and its variants in action. 

What's past is present, and so on. I've even blogged about this before. 

Lately, many people who have made names for themselves in the arts, politics, business or other high profile fields, are getting pilloried for failings in their personal lives. They're losing jobs, getting sued, even arrested, or just having their names turned into proverbial mud on the interwebs, their private shortcomings made public to all, for everyone's consumption, their reputations and lives shattered. This kind of gossip mongering used to be the province of tabloids -- in fact, that's why tabloids came into existence -- and this kind of highly private trash used to be considered tasteless to investigate and propagate to the public. Privacy used to be valued, respected, and even sometimes practiced.

No longer. Now private lives, everyone's life, is fair game. No one is safe.

You can delve into the private life of anyone -- famous or not, successful or not, whoever -- and find less than flattering, maybe even criminal, parts of their pasts. You can blare this into the public realm and create a vortex of hate for the person -- if that's your goal. 

But why would you want it to be? What does it ultimately gain you or anyone else to invade and tear apart someone's private life? To paraphrase the great show Yes, Prime Minister, when you interfere in private squabbles you're on a very slippery slope. 

And when you whip up hatred for somethings or someone, it can spill out of control -- as recent events have shown. 

It's easy to destroy, it's easy ruin something or someone. All it takes is the will to do it. Otherwise, it's easier done than said. However ... creating, building, healing, producing something, anything, making things better, is hard -- it takes all your intelligence, skills, emotions, energy, and will to do it. It took years to build the World Trade Centers and only a couple of hours to knock them down.  

That's what Cancel Culture is. Terrorism and ruin, the negation of life and those who choose to improve it.

And I'm worried that the practitioners of "cancel culture" are scaring away people who want to create, who want to build, who want to heal, who want to make the world a better place from doing so, that these people will instead retreat and stop. Why commit yourself to a career, to all this hard work, if some jealous or wounded person from your past is going to emerge from the ooze of time and wreck it? 

That's not a world I think any of us want to live in. 

But I try to take heart -- and so should you. Those who create and build and heal will always win over the nihilists. You can ruin people's reputation, try to negate their work, smear and suppress, but ultimately great work lives on, long after the creators and critics are dead, the former remembered, the latter forgotten as they deserve to be. 

I think about my own family and how those in my family who built and created wonderful things and healed others are still remembered and loved, even years and years after their death. 

Teddy Roosevelt said it best well over a hundred years ago:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Let's be in the arena together and not remove anyone from it. We'll all be removed from it eventually so let's leave as much great stuff behind in it as we can -- and not "cancel it."