Get your coat, you're cancelled (what happened to Be Kind?) | Nicola Adam column

You remember that time you did or said that thing you regret?
Nicola Adam columnNicola Adam column
Nicola Adam column

Yes, that one.

I too have plenty of things I would change if time travel was my super power.

Sadly the only super-power I possess is making crisps vanish so they remain on my conscience.

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My point is, we all get things wrong occasionally. By far the best solution is to hold your hands up and apologise, it’s a lesson we all learn.

Of course some things are unforgivable.

YOU CAN ALSO READ: The secret joy of stationeryI’m sure I don’t need to give an example of those acts of inhumanity that deserve jail time.

But mostly we all teeter along making mistakes and learning from them without our entire lives, careers, families and livelihoods being ripped from under us by a baying mob anxious to destroy everything we hold dear - simply because we said or did something we either later regretted, was thoughtless or simply wrong.

Of course I’m talking about ‘cancel culture’.

This is a trend in the social media age which sees people - largely those in the public eye - ripped to shreds by their fans, their former admirers, by those with less money than them and a less nice house, with the aim of destroying their lives.

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It came to the fore during the ‘Me too’ era and, used well, it certainly can be a useful (if legally dubious) tool to fight social injustice - but it can also be an act of bullying on a huge scale fuelled by simple nastiness and frequently sly politics.

It brings out the worst in people and is often nothing less than keyboard warriors acting like sheep and enjoying the feeling of inclusion on an ideological tide of righteousness .

Anxious for approbation, many often forget there is a real person at the end of a mass public shaming.

It’s one thing to call someone out for a mistake, another to try to ‘cancel’ them altogether with the modern version of putting their head in the stocks and throwing rocks at them, usually without any real evidence or proven justification.

There’s has been a three-four month pandemic in between now and the rise of the #bekind movement.

It feels like a century.