I tend to say what’s on my mind. Many times people don’t want to hear that.
With the growing political correctness movement and the liberal left, almost anything can be offensive now. Heck, even what I’m writing here might be offensive to someone.
But it’s hard walking on eggshells everywhere people go. Social media has made it worse with the tendency to “cancel” people. Lives have been ruined simply because of bad decisions at a moment that was captured on camera.
People say that if the people were captured on camera that way, just imagine the behaviour when they’re not. But this doesn’t mean anything as people are typically caught at their worst when emotions are high, and amygdala hijack has occurred. Let’s not forget that the camera is often capturing one side of the story, and we often don’t see what led to that point.
People do say offensive things sometimes, and the majority of the times they do not. No one should be afraid to state an opinion, even if that opinion is not liked. At what point do relationships devolve to a place where you’re scared that you say something offensive that sets off repercussions that you never imagined.
As it is now, people don’t challenge the opinion or the thinking, and instead, attack the person, often time seeking to destroy them; a new type of digital vigilantism.
Would we ever be able to drive needful changes if we’re always afraid to offend someone? Are only changes that the majority of people agree with going to be the one that will be accepted? People forget that many things we’re against now were widely accepted in the past. Somehow we’ve gained a new sense of moral outrage at a whole different level.
Free speech is not free, they say. But we certainly can’t have a functioning democracy without it.