Miles Morales Apology Video

 

Cancel culture is looked down upon by adults who think it crosses lines and mocked by teens who would agree with the piece “The Word Police” because those are the kind of teens who want to be able to say the ‘f’ slur and other condescending terms as a joke. To be on the side opposing cancel culture mostly means wanting to cancel, cancel culture. Nevertheless, even with the best of intentions sprouting from fear for teens who could be brought into an unhealthy mental health status, those who want to get rid of cancel culture stand on the same side as people who think homophobic slurs are a good nickname for their buddies. People who are not ashamed, and think being called out for it is “liberal” or refer to me as the “word police” or claim that cancel culture is too much and “people can change”. Just because something can be ‘too much’ does not mean it is wrong.

     There’s a reason cancel culture was such a big hit and was seen as an effective way to get people to own up to their mistakes. It was created as a gotcha for people in power, whether that meant people with money or people with more friends in high school. Cancel culture is a spectacle, which serves to publicly shame people for doing something they know is wrong, simply because they think they have the right/power to do so. It is something that has even been put into movies. People do make mistakes, and if they have truly changed then public opinion of them on a large scale will not be forever damaged. If it takes the threat of being denied college acceptance to stop someone from doing something so simple as not saying slurs- then it should be enough. If it takes someone to acknowledge their wrongdoings publicly, lose a couple million dollars, and apologize for their actions for them to be forced to stop being insensitive, then let it happen.

    However, there are times it is farfetched, like when someone digs up dirt on a famous person from when they were 15 because they did something that used to be acceptable. It can also be farfetched when any celebrity who has backed a company in which they had little to no action in what went wrong is cancelled. These kinds of scenarios have been normalized and accepted as the meaning of cancel culture, just as the extremist and limiting “word police” have been accepted as the only word police, when both began as a simple and honest attempt at making the world a better place. Neither of these things is wrong in their intentions or origin, but both have been tainted by extremists, mocked by those who claim ‘freedom’ is the only reason behind their concern, and scorned by those who think there is no way of making things better.

Here's Spiderman getting canceled for sponsoring baby powder as a reference to how sometimes things can be farfetched.

In the end, the actual act of canceling someone isn’t as effective as both sides make it seem. Celebrities like Kanye West are still making money, and students who were canceled still get into universities. Realistically the most effective part of cancel culture is the fear of getting canceled and what could happen, not getting cancelled.