What are you scared of? A bit of cancelation never hurt anybody.

Why do I write costly words without a pseudonym... and do I have a death wish?

Last week I said a wrong think.

I had the audacity to suggest that maybe women beating each other to a bloody pulp is not tasteful entertainment and that perhaps combat sports ought to be reserved for men, who are nature’s disposable crapshoot anyway. *Gasp.

“So what,” you say, “we all enjoy a good wrong think. Wrongthink in anonymous private group chats and X threads while using the best VPN money can buy produces the best memes ever!”

Well, the problem is that I logged into every single social media channel I could get my hands on and wrong thinked with my name and my beautiful visage publicly displayed for all to see.

I was, of course, drawn and quartered by an angry mob of acquaintances that I accumulated sometime or another. I also received invitations to friendly dialogue with other citizens like this one:

So, this led me to some much-needed reflection. Why the hell do I do this to myself?

I don’t know when I started saying the thing.

I always had a hard time with pretending. 

Maybe it was after Mike, the popular skateboarder with the hot girlfriend hung himself in his closet. That showed me that the sticky, sweet poison of suburban respectability had a dark side.

Maybe it was when my dad put our family photo on his “Keeping your Kids Catholic” talk CD. 

It’s a great talk, actually.

I certainly knew our family could have been better. Especially since I resented my dad with every ounce of spite a 15-year-old could muster the day we took that family photo. Probably because he wouldn’t drive me to band practice. 

Maybe my knee-jerk need to say the thing that is absolutely guaranteed to lose me friends and opportunities developed due to my disgust with myself for living a double life, the youth group kid on Sundays and the punk rock womanizer the rest of the week. 

What each of those experiences has in common is communal lying. We all have to pretend a bit here and there to get by.  We pretend it doesn’t drive us crazy when our spouse uses an entire roll of toilet paper when they go to the bathroom. We pretend that our boss’ decisions are all fantastic!!!!! 

But at what point does all of the pretending kill your soul? 

We live in a world of lies; we know it, and yet we’re all collectively pretending it’s okay because if we don’t, people like Jim will send a poignant email to our HR officer about our misbehavior and get us canceled.

Our livelihood and family’s survival hinge on whether we can maintain the pretense that we’re good, milk-toast centrists. 

Such nice teeth for being toothless.

So we stay silent.

We go to the mandatory DEI training.

We let the SJ warriors run the boardroom.

We let the public schools teach our kids that Christianity is the cause of all of the world's problems.

We let the therapists tell the kids that all of their bad feelings are our fault.

We keep our heads down.

And our bodies and souls shrivel as a result.

Lying kills you, body and soul.

So yeah, I’m writing under my own name because I don’t want to die a shriveled husk of a man. I don’t have a million followers or a few hundred grand in FU money to soften the impact, but I care about my spirit.

So, thank you to those of you who are speaking up. You give us hope, and your sacrifices are not in vain.

For those of you still playing it safe, just realize that it will get harder and harder to hide. COVID was just the beginning. And don’t think that you are fooling anyone in your life anyway. The people around you know which team you’re on.

So next time Lesly suggests that we should make the next Star Wars show about all-black feminist space witches who get pregnant with the force, go ahead and risk your job to say, “maybe we shouldn’t do that.” 

Don’t worry; the critics gave it a 69-point “woke” boost because everything is propaganda now.

Or when Javie suggests that our next Army Ad should be about a woman recruit with two moms,”  just go ahead and say “why don’t we just go back to ‘be all you can be instead.” That one won’t get you fired actually.

But DEFINITELY tell the HR director at your airline, “Maybe we should hire the pilots least likely to kill passengers instead of hiring based on melanin.” You WILL probably get fired, but at least you’ll have a good shot at becoming internet famous when you tell your story. 

As long as you don’t make memes about Hillary Clinton, you’re not risking jail over here yet.

It’s not as bad as Britain, where they arrest literal grandmas for posting the wrong thing.

I’m not saying anons need to go and dox yourselves right now. Obviously, there are profound considerations at play here.

If you can’t own your words and stand behind them yet, consider what would need to be true of your life to do so.

Then do that.

Veritas vincit

Ps. If you’re worried about cancelation, check out these guys; I’ve heard good things: Pluribus