No debate is the point
Dear Harper’s & Letter Signatories
You’re right, so-called cancel culture will discourage “debate”. But maybe that’s the point: people don’t want to hear another word. But, don’t be surprised because many of you have actually led us here with your preparatory work in the preceding decades. Thank you. And also:
It’s 2020.
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It’s post-9/11, post two trillion-dollar wars (one waged on a false premise), it’s decades of stagnant, below-living wages in an era of record wealth inequality, it’s years of billions in aid to apartheid states and oppressive regimes, it’s still only 3% of women in leadership, it’s the unnecessary militarization of police, it’s post economic crash with no arrests of the hugest looters of our economy — gambler bankers, it’s post Occupy Wall Street, it’s extortionate drug prices and insurance premiums, it’s a reckoning of what the War on Drugs was really all about, it’s old white men making legal profits on marijuana, while young Black men languish in prison for the same, it’s record student debt, record opioid deaths, it’s the systemic brutaliation and economic oppression of the Black community, it’s the lack of humanity afforded to transgendered men and women when it’s their bodies that are consistently on the frontlines in war and seminal protests, it’s the constant violation of Native land rights, it’s federal governments STILL investing in fossil fuels, it’s essential workers being sacrificed for the economy in an ill-contained pandemic.
It’s the biggest carceral state in human history.
WHAT, praytell, would you like to “debate” at this point?
Too many important issues have finally been boiled down to their moral essence after simmering for decades. It’s time to get down to WORK to fix them, not forever slice things in 5 different ways.
We are in an age of self-branding, where no speaker / writer / presenter can surprise any audience with nuance or change of heart anyway. Bios, stances and voting records are ubiquitous, and googlable. We’ve already watched your Ted Talk and bought your book. Do you really need more of our attention?? Because we are BUSY!
If you want to debate, then debate the fine details of Bills that will solve these issues — nobody is cancelling that. Else, we’ll leave it to Trevor Noah to interview the spectrum of pundits with book deals. It’s enough.
