Understanding

I understand that we are in a very sensitive time now, - racially, sexually - where we are able to acknowledge and be better than we've been in the past.  Personally, I've always just kind of thought people were people who should be judged on their merits and their behaviour, not on their skin colour, ethnicity, or gender - but what do I know?


However, I think that crucifying, or excuse me, cancelling people for things they did in the past, during a time when we were not as aware and were not as sensitive, is unfair.  Context is always important.  And the context of time is something that people fail to consider.   Yes, we should always have been sensitive.  Unfortunately, we were not always as "woke" as we are becoming.  It is a process, and we are growing. 

How many of us who are now in our thirties or forties ran around the school playground calling our school mates "retarded" when we just meant they were acting silly?  We changed.  We adapted our language and behaviour. But we weren't all called out publicly for that behaviour twenty years later. It's just as offensive as a racial slur, but we didn't know. We do now, so we've changed.   It's the change part that's important.

Things that we do and say now will likely be judged just as harshly in the future as we are judging people now.   There will be different rules and expectations for our sensitivities.  But to hold us to those standards now, before we know what they are is unfair.   When we look back in twenty years, I would hope that we would be kind to ourselves, acknowledging that we weren't always our best selves, but confident that we grew as people and became better.

If we find a bad incident in someone's past, but that person acknowledges that it wasn't their best choice and has grown beyond that moment, I think society needs to be kinder.   We have a tendency to paint everyone with the brush of their past behaviour, and in my experience, most people change.  Especially in society today.  Sometimes it's hard to keep up.  But I see people trying.  And that's really the best thing we can ask for.  As long as everyone is trying shouldn't that be the point?   Haven't we all made mistakes in our past?  Haven't we all hurt someone by doing or saying something offensive, even inadvertently.

We shouldn't be tearing people down for their mistakes - we should be educating society, asking them to lift themselves up to a better level.  To change.  To do better.  To be better.