When I was in college, I really enjoyed the philosophy courses where professors and students would openly discuss all sorts of different aspects of so many different things with little fear of being labeled some sort of derogatory name and shamed into Cancel Land.  I was lucky because most of my classes had fewer students and discussions were more genuine and authentic.

Anyway, that leads me to the story of the father who rushed a high school graduation stage to prevent a black superintendent from shaking the hand of his graduating daughter.  A link to a news story on the incident is below.

At first, it seems pretty clear what happened, right?  Then, later, the father, while not really providing a complete reason for his behavior, did attribute it to some sort of issue, possibly bullying, with his daughter and this particular superintendent and his possible failure to do anything about the bullying.  

Now, I do not know what it is all about, but it started me thinking, and because of one of our daughters recently coming out, I then thought of a philosophical angle that could be added to see this incident in a completely different way.

Imagine if the school in question was a private Parochial school and the black superintendent was a far-right Christian and this man's daughter was gay and had been bullied and the superintendent did nothing about such things.  Imagine the cheering that would have went on from the Left if that had been the case. 

Or, even in the case at hand, what if this young lady was bullied and for some reason, everyone turned a blind eye and so on and that this father was dealing with that? Maybe his daughter was involved in self-harm due to bullying. 

Don't get me wrong - I am not excusing any sort of behavior, but just pointing out that back when I was in college, things like this were not topics of cancellation.  It's like this constant parsing of word meaning where people grasp onto kernels of a comment and extrapolate that in the most exaggerated way just to score points or win an argument.  Instead, we have this society that is so sensitive that the mere approaching of discussion of any sort of outlying aspect of a topic causes so many of these dominate snowflakes to clutch their pearls and scream at you like they are pod people discovering you are a thinking human instead of one of them.