Gen X Would Very Much Like To Be Left Out of These Meaningless "Cancel Culture" Conversations – The Mary Sue

A recent article from theNY Post is calling for members of Generation X to save the world from cancel culture. And after getting picked up by Fox News, the article is being laughed into oblivion by Gen X on Twitter, who would very much like to be excluded from this narrative.

In the heavily exaggerated wars between Boomers and Millennials, and Millennials and Gen Z, Gen Xthose born between the mid-1960s and early 80shave largely been able to stay out of the fray. A lot of them also pride themselves on that. But writer Matthew Hennessey has decided that this generation is the last hope to stop this current trend of holding people accountable for their actions and shifting away from media containing racist images.

But despite being a self-proclaimed member of Gen X, Hennessey has a strange understanding of what the world looked like during his formative years.

We grew up in a country that didnt ban books. We all agreed that witch hunts and blacklists were bad. Censorship was an outrage. The 1980s were not that long ago. Dont act like you dont know what Im talking about, he writes.

I dont know how he came to the conclusion that books werent being banned in the 1980s but they absolutely were. Everything fromThe Satanic Verses to the Dungeon Masters Guide toThe Color Purple and so many more were banned from schools and libraries. He even usesHuck Finn as an example of modern cancel culture, even though thats been banned off and on in various forms since right after it was published nearly a century and a half ago.

The generation that fought for its right to party should be leading the charge against these millennial Maoists terrorizing the culture via social media, Hennesseys article reads, making the extremely interesting choice to quote the Beastie Boysa band that has worked hard to make amends for the rampant sexism present in their early work. Self-inflicted cancel culture!

Hennesseys approach to his argument is poorly plotted. He brings up instances of cancel culture that his generation experiencedspecifically, Tipper Gores campaign to add ratings to music with explicit lyrics. But he also frames the 80s as an era where cancel culture didnt exist, where people could agree to disagree. In reality, those kids grew up seeing how absurd this sort of culture war was and now take offense to their Fox News elders telling them they should fight against censorship in any forms. (Especially since that view of cancel culture has nothing to do with censorship and everything to do with human decency.)

Moreover, that generation has already been through all of this once, when the big villain put forth by the right was political correctness, which really just meant common decency. Now weve got cancel culture, which is really just accountability.

Hennesseys version of the present is just as baffling as his version of the past. In the fight against cancel culture, he writes, We will have to engage in a thousand tiny battles every day and it will be terribly uncomfortable. Itll be hard standing up to school administrators pushing an anti-racist curriculum on your kids. Itll take real courage to refuse to call yourself a bigot and to denounce the people who raised you.

First of all, someone should tell him that theres already a word for anti-anti-racism and its just racism. Also, I dont think Gen X has any problem denouncing their parentsthe people who tried to cancelD&D and Twisted Sister. (The latter of which, by the way, didnt really happensomeone should listen to the recentYoure Wrong Aboutpodcast episode about that whole Tipper Gore campaign. They might learn something!)

If we cant find the guts to do this dirty job, the second half of our lives is going to look very different than the first half did, he writes. We will taste life in Siberia. Our children and our childrens children will be forced to navigate a miserable, paranoid world of lies and deception. They will be asked to spy on their own parents. They will denounce their friends.

You heard it hear first. If we dont buy all the books written by transphobes and keep watching movies with grotesque racist caricatures, then were basically inviting a new wave of Nazi Youtha panopticon of surveillance and social banishment.

What an argument.

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Gen X Would Very Much Like To Be Left Out of These Meaningless "Cancel Culture" Conversations - The Mary Sue