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Ron Marr's Musings

The Revolution Has Been Cancelled

by Ron Marr

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RON MARR

CANDID, NOT CANCELLED

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Back in the ’60s and ’70s, those halcyon days of annoying hippies, horrid fashion choices, and great music, a common refrain among the young was that you should “never trust anyone over 30.” Although I found the peacenik and flower child crowd a trifle naive and goofy, they may have been onto something. Their premise was correct, but their chronology was wrong.

It’s safer to adopt an approach of never trusting anyone under 120.

This is an especially wise strategy in our present era, where almost nothing you read, hear, or see should be trusted at first (or even 15th) glance. We live in an age where dissembling, spin, double-talk, and outright lies are considered a perfectly acceptable part of the national daily discourse—something to be expected and accepted. Not a day passes that we don’t encounter obvious and frequent falsehoods from politicians, journalists, pundits, celebrities, and activists. The nonsense they spout—often ridiculous beyond belief and pernicious beyond measure—is then disseminated nonstop via the social and mainstream media monopolies and purported to be absolute truth.

There was always more than a bit of accuracy in this old adage: “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will eventually believe it.” However, America’s 21st-century, social-media mobs have taken this concept to a new and frightening plateau. People feel compelled to voice public agreement and support of inane and ludicrous assertions and positions they know are alarming, unhealthy, and imbecilic. They know questioning preposterous statements championed by the powerful and famous is very nearly a crime. Failure to toe the line established by the loudest, strangest, and least intelligent in society results in being fired, humiliated, attacked, socially shunned, and perhaps even disavowed by friends, neighbors, and family.

The present cultural message is this: Straighten up and fly right, get with the “correct” program, or you will be cancelled.

I spent a good deal of my younger life, mostly pre-internet, as a newspaper opinion columnist. I was fired from every newspaper that ever hired me, primarily because my opinions, popular with readers, were unpopular with editors and reporters incensed by my ideology. That was no big deal. I viewed each termination as a badge of honor and still brag that I was cancelled about two decades before cancelling was cool.

Today, however, the response to those same opinions would be far greater than a mere pink slip. The words and thoughts would be labeled “disinformation” or “hate speech” by the tech and media monopolies—barred, banned, and prohibited. I find that sad. While I continue to believe our nation was founded on maximizing individual liberty and freedom, not on insuring safety or equity, such a philosophy has fallen into disfavor.

Honestly, I wouldn’t care if I was cancelled by the self-appointed censors of the 21st century; I’d be amused by it. My small group of friends are loyal and tolerant, and they’re not likely to dump me. Most of my time is spent hanging around the farm, shooting at stuff, catching catfish, making music, and generally entertaining myself, so I’m socially invulnerable. My dogs, Hugo and Cooper, would never toss me overboard, partly because they like me and partly because I feed them.

Honestly, being cancelled would just give me another excuse to lie on the couch and crack open a book.

Orwell comes to mind.


This column was originally published in the October 2022 edition of Missouri Life magazine.

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