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Prior to the American experiment, several highly civilized cultures (the "foreigners" our local Trumpeters would call them) had methods, sometimes every elaborate, of resolving disputes, elaborate courtesies that provided for a reduction of the social friction that exists among human beings because of our innate broken-ness.

   The right of free speech is an Enlightenment ideal---and the shadowy side of the Enlightenment resulted in the ravings of Voltaire and Tom Paine, and allowed a psychopath, or sociopath, named Robespierre to send innocent adolescents to the guillotine simply because they identified with the wrong surname, or had gone to the wrong school.  Robespierre's spiritual but spiritually bastard son, Lenin, ordered the brutal murder of four adolescent girls and their prepubescent brother in a damp cellar beneath a house in an out of the way village.  Now that is cancel culture.

     In the continuing decline of certain aspects of the American experiment, our society has developed a sense---which it misinterprets as both a right and a requirement---that any damn fool thing that spills out of someone's unrestrained mouth, or their empty braincase, is worthy of being expressed, without consideration of the effect of that statement upon those to whom it is directed, or those who overheard it even by casual adjacency.  Let us say I make good, homecooked, pizza (I don't, but let's say that I do); and that, for many years, I have made it with pepperoni and mushrooms.  Then, I decide to make pizzas with anchovies and olives---because that goes to my present taste.  My next-door neighbors dislike this combination.  My next-door neighbors also believe that they not only have the right, but the duty, to inform me of this; and do so, in the hearing of others whose opinions (unlike the next-door neighbors') I happen to value.  For some reason, the next-doors did not have sufficient couth, or insight, to consider that this kind of comment would best be made, if it must be made at all, privately.  But the next-doors are what I have called elsewhere, rightsers:  you will not wrest from them their soapboxes or their pop-guns which they have by the rights bestowed upon them by Gawd, the Consteetushon, and the King James Bible.  Then, when I inform them, as openly, that I couldn't care less about their opinions on pizza, nor will I entertain their opinions again, they withdraw in a huff, and put it about the neighborhood that I am a proponent of cancel culture.

      What is wrong with this picture is that the next-doors cannot move to the next obvious step, that the friction they have created could be easily ameliorated by an apology.  Not even an apology for exercizing their Gawd-given free (or is it spree) speech, but by apologizing for its effect and perhaps stating (if the statement would be true) that the effect was not intended.

      Cancel Culture is the response of people who are fed up with being disrespected; or with hypocrisy; or with the trumpeting stupidity of the thugs who brough insurrection upon the Capitol

       Free speech, as the Framers intended it to be, must be civil, courteous, and respectful of its hearers---those who agree with it as well as those who disagree.  In failing to realize this, and impart this, part of the American experiment has failed.  Cancel culture is an attempt, perhaps clumsy at times, to correct this.  Like when the people of Paris, fed up to the brim with Robespierre's excesses, sent him, as well, to the national razor.  

       And to the rightsers, the insurrectionists, and the clodhoppery next-doors (who love to stand up for Jay-zus and the King James Verzyun; but disparage their neighbors---them "for'ners"---at every opportunity):  if you refuse to apologize for your "Spree Speech," perhaps you can apologize for the effects, intentional or not, of your Spree Speech.

Starward