REFLECTION
Political correctness. It’s the word on everyone’s lips. Brands scurry to get it right, to avoid the wrath of strangers online that could potentially determine the fall of empires. Vitriol. That is all that is needed. Spew vitriol like acid, let it spread in the same manner as cancer, through quotes, retweets, screenshots, and there you have it. A person or brand would crumble at your feet.
Remember the roman mob at the colosseum. They thirsted for blood, but not enough to offend their sensibilities. You had to be sleek about it as a gladiator. Provide them with a show, but don’t get so caught up in it because their loyalties switched with a frightening speed.
When you pander to political correctness as a person, you are caught in that colosseum, performing for the roman mob with lions ready to devour you held in cells. You are playing out the role of a gladiator, bound hands and feet, primal and desperate to survive.
It is a terrible things for your opinions to bow to the whims and caprices of strangers. For you to desperately struggle to prove a point and assert your relevance, to a world that only exists through servers and internet service providers. Yet, this world has repercussions in the real, tangible part of life. It has driven people to lose their jobs, to kill themselves, to divorce their partners, run away from home, quit their jobs, jettison a relationship.
This is not a righteous epistle that aims to cancel the internet. It is simply, a reflection. I too, am caught in the web. I wan to disappear from the internet but still, my livelihood depends on my visibility, on my public growth and loud announcements of my achievement. So, like everyone else, I put on a poker face and pose with my favorite suit on LinkedIn. I comment ‘congratulations’ on the posts of people I don’t even like. I craft my sentences carefully, delete them if they seem too ambiguous, if they could offend a certain group of people. In this world of pixelated screens and servers, you have to look over your shoulders, count your teeth, filter your opinions. Or, you could be a dead man.
writer- martins-q