I was A Good Person until I wasn't

Still from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1932

For years, I got away with expressing polite but wide-ranging skepticism about the new roster of ‘progressive’ orthodoxies. I avoided a few known landmines but I didn’t falsify my beliefs, just softened them a bit. I asked questions I should not have asked, questions that strongly suggested I still knew things I ought to have forgotten overcome.

Yet I didn’t fall out with anyone during that time. Instead, I was repeatedly “called in.”

“Napalm came from Harvard [and so did this handy guide!]. Veritas!” — Kurt Vonnegut

I was never called in for my serious crimes, only for misdemeanors. But I was definitely a repeat offender. Once I made the mistake of laughing too hard at a joke about Trump’s small hands. Laughing at jokes about men with small hands having small penises and therefore being less manly apparently offends women who identify as men who have small hands and no penises. This all seemed rather byzantine to me but I digress. I made the mistake of looking forward to spending Thanksgiving with my family (pernicious settler-colonialism in action!). I suggested we drop the land acknowledgement from a presentation that was running over time (the substance got sacrificed instead). I said I didn’t have any inner feeling that made me a woman and that I was just female (and that that didn’t make me agender). I criticized Islam (and I’d do it again!). I questioned the claim that valuing the “written word” was a manifestation of white supremacy (I even did it in writing). I said things like “OK, but we can agree everybody who has ever gotten pregnant is female, right?” (Wrong.) In other words: I was your standard liberal c. 2010. But it was 2015.

As a result, I experienced a lot of one-on-one interventions where I could tell that my friend or colleague had anxiously plotted out talking points in advance—or at least skimmed a Buzzfeed listicle. And I would say things like, “I understand where you’re coming from but I don’t see it that way.” As a reeducation subject, I was lacking.

These friends of mine showed me the kind of tolerance one might show an aging relative who’s losing her marbles one by one. Or perhaps ‘indulgence’ is a better word than tolerance: You know how she is.

I was a little problematic, sure, but that was about it. I was still one of the Good People. I just had stick-in-the-mud tendencies. When I lodged verboten objections, I was surely only playing Devil’s advocate—not yet a capital offense.

But at a certain point, I seem to have crossed over from being seen as a Good Person Who Is A Little Off-Script to a Bad Person Who Really Meant What She Was Saying All Along. And not only had I meant every ‘problematic’ thing I’d ever said (😬), but those problematic comments were suddenly recast as mere dogwhistles for all of the truly heinous things I had never dared to say out loud and would vociferously deny if asked but no doubt believed deep down.

That was the point of no return. Nothing I could say—even if I had been able to print off every thought that had ever run through my head—could have cleared my name.

This is the thing it’s impossible to understand until you find yourself on the wrong side of it. You always think you’ll be able to explain yourself and be understood. That any cancellation attempts leveled against you will be misunderstandings and so of course you will be able to convince your cancellers they picked the wrong target. (The revolution leaps and sometimes overleaps!—or something.)

But once you’ve been marked, it’s over. Your every word will be twisted, your motives impugned, your clearest speech declared a mere cover for bigotry. There will be nothing you can do about it.

The consolation is that, over time, more and more people will find themselves on the wrong side of the line, for lesser and lesser ideological crimes. It’s getting less lonely over here all the time.