We live in a political world Courage is a thing of the past The houses are haunted, children aren't wanted Your next day could be your last - Bob Dylan, lyrics from “Political World”
Courage is a thing of the past. I’ve been wondering if it takes courage to speak up these days, or if speaking is just making more noise, in a social media world that is becoming louder by the minute. According to Google, around 3.7million new videos are uploaded to YouTube every day – that's around 271,330 hours of video content based on an average length of 4.4 minutes. 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram per day. I wonder how many of those are politically oriented gab. Those statistics make me want to rebel against the tide of talk and be courageous by going radio silent.
But then...it becomes personal. A friend is tangled in the flotsam of that rising tide, and that which was precariously tempered on the tip of my tongue spills over.
Like many of us, in just a few years’ time, we’ve watched the polarization of politics become so intense that families, friends, businesses and even churches can be torn apart by not being on the same side of the isle. The intolerance goes beyond mere disdain for the opposing candidates; it has become combative to the point of ruining a person’s career or online presence. This has become known as the age of Cancel Culture.
Just yesterday I listened to a clip of Tucker Carlson interviewing mega-star Kanye West, who has been under political attack for years (he has the audacity to be a black man in Hollywood who is a pro-life Christian conservative), though it has recently reached a climax due to West pushing back in a brazen move that exposed his attackers’ hypocrisy by wearing "White Lives Matter" shirts at a fashion show.
Carlson asked West about the story behind the shirt: “I felt this need to express myself on another level when Trump was running for office and I really liked him, and everyone…told me that if I said I liked Trump, my career and life would be over…they basically said I would be killed for wearing the [MAGA] hat.” (Fox News, YouTube)
Let’s pause here for a moment. Someone could lose their career - their life - for wearing a hat? For supporting someone who happened to be the president of his own country? And this is America we’re talking about here: “land of the free” - supposedly.
Lucky for Kanye, he’s essentially too big to cancel entirely. Thus, his opposition resort to the old standby ad hominem attack: he is dismissed as mentally ill. This could still cause his demise (he could suddenly “commit suicide”), but in some sense, because of his protective celebrity privileges, he’s nearly immune from being entirely disappeared.
Not all of us are this lucky. Recently a 41 year-old man was arrested for intentionally striking 18-year-old Cayler Ellingson with his SUV and killing him, admitting he did so because of Ellingson’s political views. The man claimed Ellingson was part of a “right wing extremist” group. Really? An 18 year old being so extreme he felt the need to run the kid over?
This word - “extreme” - was also used as slander against Kanye West when he wore the “White Lives Matter” shirt. “West is legitimizing extremism,” quips Rolling Stone. Extreme? For wearing a shirt with a statement that is essentially true? What strikes me as more “extreme” is killing someone, or trying to cancel them for apparel, in a country with free speech laws.
“Extreme” is the word used against my friend and her political associates, who are part of a bi-partisan - let me repeat that - BI-PARTISAN elector organization who simply wanted to support each other on reasonable issues that were cross-party concerns. Nonetheless, despite my friend self-identifying as a Democratic Socialist, she is being labelled as a far-right extremist.
This accusation was how I discovered she was running for office in the first place. There is a particular person I follow on Facebook whom I watch closely, as he seems to have his finger on the pulse of local cancel culture…or rather he’s using that finger to point at others, including this friend whom I can vouch for as having sensible standards that are being mis-represented as an attempt to smear her reputation.
I decided the best approach was to give the accused a platform to speak for herself. In this video, I interview Victoria City Council candidate Sandy Janzen. Running for City Council does not require a candidate to align with a particular party. Instead, Janzen is part of the Vancouver Island Voters Association (VIVA). According to their website, VIVA is “a registered British Columbia not-for-profit society with a mission to promote citizen engagement, education and participation in democratic electoral processes on Vancouver Island.” (https://vivavictoria.ca/about/)
During the interview, Janzen and I discuss why VIVA and herself are maligned (as we will find out, it could apparently be called VIGA: Vancouver Island Guilt by Association), and I finally give myself permission to speak out about why I have been following this Facebook account so closely…and believe me, it’s extreme. In the video, Janzen and I are spirited, off-color, and revealing…and perhaps even courageous.
"They have people that are around them at all times telling them what to be afraid of - not what to do or say specifically, but what to be afraid of...it's not that we have to agree...no one is God and everyone has an opinion." - Kanye West
If I’m really courageous, there will be a Part Two, in which I speak more directly about my Facebook nemesis…not courageous simply because I exercise my right to free speech about topics that could get me socially suicided, but because I am exercising, as Janzen poignantly puts it, my right to offend and be offended. If we all maturely understood that that right is built into freedom of expression, cancel culture would be, well, cancelled.
