HEAR! HEAR!
"And history is where purity politics really starts to look childish. Human beings are not born finished. They are not born knowing everything they will one day know. They are not born with the full vocabulary of power, harm, systems, trauma, domination, boundaries, identity, labor, exploitation, patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, all of it already installed in the skull like factory software. They learn badly, unevenly, late, through pain, through humiliation, through experience, through hurting others, through being hurt, through correction, through books, through age, through luck. There is a reason it is called a learning curve and not a moral apparition. People grow in jerks and starts. They carry old stupidity. They shed it imperfectly. They backslide. They improve. They get embarrassed by who they were. They find out ten years too late that something they once took for granted was cruel or ignorant or vulgar. This is called being a person.
Online, though, none of that seems to matter much. Online, growth is less interesting than prosecution. The internet is full of people who talk as if they sprang fully formed from the forehead of justice, already fluent in every code, already pure in appetite, already impeccable in association, already beyond contradiction. It is nonsense, of course. Most of these people have simply learned to curate themselves more aggressively than the rest of us. They are editors. But because they can edit in public, they begin to believe the edit is the self. And that is how you end up with these ridiculous little moral pageants where somebody is not just asked to reject a bad person in the present, but to retroactively disown any joy, memory, sentiment, or attachment connected to them. You loved those books as a child? Burn the memory. You were moved by that painting? Shame on your retina. You still talk to someone flawed? Then perhaps you are the flaw.
There is something deeply anti-human in that. Because real life is full of attachment, contradiction, sediment, leftover feeling, things that mattered before you knew everything you know now, things that still matter even after knowledge arrives. A terrible person may have made something that once saved you. A compromised artist may still have made something beautiful. A deeply imperfect relative may still be the person who held your hand in the hospital. A longtime friend may say something ugly and disappointing and still not become instantly reducible to a single verdict. Some people absolutely should be thrown out of your life. Some absolutely should not. And the fact that different people draw those lines differently is a sign that life is harder than slogans make it sound."
https://lylewfass.substack.com/p/the-purity-olympics?r=1qxhlr&utm_id=97758_v0_s00_e0_tv2_a1dennhb8qqcmy&triedRedirect=true
