These men will never get their day in court to read their victim statements, and be cheered on by the public, but given how uncomfortable we are with the subject matter, even if they did, would we welcome it the same way we did during the trial of Larry Nasser? If not, what does that say about us?
It’s enough to make you just give it all up and walk away.
That, to me, is cancel culture. I know there’s a lot of talk about cancel culture and whether it even exists or not, but frankly, to me, the real canceling that goes on online is when the good, thoughtful and caring, people just walk away instead of being here and having their voices matter. Because they’re tired. They’re tired of the constant outrage, the constant anger directed at them for not doing, and believing, everything random people expect them to. The vitriol directed at them in direct messages, comments, and tweets for simply trying to have a conversation, from all sides. For not supporting conspiracy groups, for not using the correct words, for not advocating for exactly the same things, in exactly then same way. Because if you don’t “agree” with them and show your support, in clear, and often financial, ways, you are the enemy.
Seriously, it gets old. It’s toxic. It’s exhausting. It makes you question why you even bother with this at all. I, for one, don’t need this in my life on a regular basis. No one does. So, instead of having real conversations about real issues, and doing real education, we’re walking away and letting the worst kinds of people win the internet.
I’m tired, but I’m not ready to do that. If 19 years of working to educate people, and let anyone know that they are not alone as a survivor, or as a person dealing with mental health issues, isn’t enough for you, and you can’t understand that all of the things I do online to make this happen I do in my spare time, for free, then you can go somewhere else.
Take all of your fake outrage and fake “facts” with you too.
If you pay attention to the news at all, I’m sure you’ve seen something about Larry Nasser over the past couple of years. You may even be fairly familiar with the story. If so, the Netflix documentary Athlete A might not offer a lot of things you don’t know to some extent or other. But, you may want to watch it anyway, even though watching it and hearing the stories will be difficult. I did a couple of nights ago, and had a couple of thoughts about it, in no real order of importance.
I have been on record saying that if you truly believe in a cause, and the importance of it, you need to be the first to call out untruths.
I’ve said it about false rape allegations, false child abuse allegations, fake hate crimes, etc.
If you believe rape, abuse, and hate crimes are big issues that our society needs to be concerned with, and that the victims need to believed, you need to be the first to call it out when someone undermines the issue by spreading false stories.
So, while it may cost me some followers, let me just say this. If you believe QAnon conspiracy theories about elite pedophile gangs and sex trafficking rings with zero proof aside from some seeming coincidences with a bunch of half-true facts, and go spreading them around, you are undermining the very serious issue we have in society with actual, real pedophiles, elite and otherwise, and real, true to life, sex trafficking.
Think about it. Right now, this very second, you are reading this post because either you found the headline intriguing and clicked, or someone shared it with you and said you should read it, and you clicked. In both cases, you were persuaded by another person to do something. If you saw it on Facebook or other social media platform, there’s a Facebook algorithm watching you and trying to give you more stuff you like, to persuade you to keep coming back to Facebook, and you’re reading it on a device that you were persuaded to purchase by some other factor in your life.
Not to mention the fact that parents, teachers, or someone, somewhere, persuaded you to learn to read. You were persuaded, even manipulated, to go to school, study, become the sort of person who could get a well-enough paying job to own a piece of technology and pay for an internet connection, and all of that wound up with you, right here, right now.
You were “groomed” to do what you are doing right now. And yet, so many want to look at children, and make them responsible for knowing which persuasion is good for them and which isn’t.
All of the caveats aside about ACE scores that I’ve written about before, (tl;dr – Yes the more childhood traumas you’ve had, the more likely you will deal with various issues as an adult, but it’s not a set fate for everyone.) I think we can, however, accept that children who dealt with more traumatic…
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