By Meagan Fischer
I was honored to be invited to write a reader essay for Tangle a number of months ago, but I’ve been stuck on it for months. It normally wouldn’t be ‘good writing’ to start by sharing that, but in this case my trouble finding my voice for this audience connects to what I find it necessary to write about. My voice has been stuck in part because I haven’t felt safe to use it in so many situations. Some of those situations were personal and not directly connected to political discourse (though I could easily digress here about the personal being political), but a significant contributing factor to how I lost my voice was both personal and political: cancel culture.
My own personal experience with cancel culture not only led me to be afraid of speaking my mind and heart; it has also created a backlog of things I wanted to say but didn’t know how, or where I could express them with any expectation of being heard or respected by the people around me. Many moments when my words stuck in my throat have become crystallized memories, frozen in my psyche. One of them was knocked loose recently while reading Isaac’s comment in his March 18th take on Cuba: “It is the peak of American-obsessive criticism, often proffered by non-interventionists and progressives, to look at Cuba and think we are responsible for all its struggles.”
This brought me back to circa 2017, when I had returned to the California State University, Chico campus after an absence of four years from higher education to finish a bachelor’s degree in a new major, Latin American Studies. After a year surrounded by public policy up-and-comers while interning with the Friends Committee On National Legislation, I decided any degree at all would help me be taken more seriously. I already had all my general education requirements and a few Spanish classes under my belt, plus I had traveled in Latin America, so Latin American Studies would be an easy major to complete. Little did I know how much the insights from my classes would dovetail with my observations of the activist networks I had embedded myself in.
The rise of algorithmic clicktivism over the previous few years had strained my sometimes deep, loving relationship with nuance and complexity. I noticed the changing times bringing out the most self-righteous version of my advocacy — the same passion and surety of my correctness that led me to berate my mom in my teen years for not taking the full step from vegetarianism to veganism, backed up by many a disturbing PETA pamphlet. (Self-disclosure: I spent only a small percentage of my life eating vegan, though I continue to be deeply concerned for animal welfare and will happily shell out extra dollars, even on a limited budget, for a Certified Humane label.)
But despite the supposed leftist-brainwashing of the university, studying Latin America was actually pushing me the other way — possibly because where I was at the time left me little room further to the left to go. My takeaway from studying Salvador Allende’s Chilean presidency was that when people push too fast and hard to the left without sufficient popular buy-in, worse outcomes may result from the inevitable pendulum swing I’ve seen this reflected in contemporary times with the Trump administrations.
