“I WAS DONE:” The Day Nellie Bowles Left the New Progressive Movement.
Near the end of Morning After the Revolution, Bowles wrote:
To do a cancellation is a very warm, social thing. It has the energy of a potluck. Everyone brings what they can, and everyone is impressed by the creativity of their friends. It’s a positive thing, what you’re doing, and it doesn’t feel like battle so much as nurturing the love for one’s friends, tending the warm fire of a cause. You have real power when you’re doing it. And with enough people, you can oust someone very powerful.
The easy criticism of a cancellation is: You went after someone who agrees with you on almost everything but some minor tiny differences? Some small infraction? It seems bizarre. But that’s the point. The bad among us are more dangerous to the group*. Mormons don’t excommunicate a random drag performer. They excommunicate a bad Mormon. I’d watched all the presidential debates in 2016 with some family members, who are conservatives. After Hillary lost, I couldn’t stomach going over there for a few months. I was too upset, and I couldn’t handle seeing them happy. But that’s not a cancellation. I had no power over these family members or sway in their community. I couldn’t make them apologize for being happy that Trump won.
* * * * * * * *
Because around my thirtieth birthday, there came a day when I didn’t cancel someone, and it was the true end of my time in the movement. Reporting on the wrong topics had gotten me close. But it was resisting a cancellation that did me in.
I knew the thing I was meant to yell about that day. I knew the tweet I was meant to send, but I liked the target too much. He was sweet and younger than me. I was agonized over it, sweating in my apartment. I sometimes get this bizarre psychosomatic stress response where my arms go limp in a panic, and all that day my arms were going limp. I got a few notes pushing me to join in. It was important. We had to draw a line that day. We had to speak in unison. My voice needed to bolster the other voices.
I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t think the violation was so bad. I’d gotten old or soft or something, and there I was, too pathetic and limp-armed to even send a nasty tweet.
Eventually that close friend of mine from the book circled back to me. The one I had canceled in honor of. We’d lived together at one point when we were both coming up in the world, cooked together, talked about our families, plotted our careers together. Both our lives came to fruition as we’d planned them, and there was a thrill in that with each other. I loved this friend and still do. But I knew what was coming when I saw her name on my phone.
She said very nicely that it was suspicious how quiet I was that day. She said, Nellie, you say a lot of things, yet you haven’t said anything about this one, today. She very politely told me that I was a racist. Then she said goodbye.
Congrats leftists – you’ve finally become Ted Knight’s Judge Elihu Smails character from Caddyshack: “I’ve sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn’t want to do it. I felt I owed it to them.”
* Contrast this with President Reagan’s famous quote, “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally – not a 20 percent traitor.”