Anyone over the age of 40 is happy that cellphone cameras and social media didn’t exist when we were young.

We did all the dumb stuff that young people do now, we just didn’t have friends (or random strangers) to document it.

Not only is that a good thing because we get to keep our jobs and reputations, but it is a good thing because it allowed us to grow.

When you are young you are dumb. Not stupid, just dumb. You have an adult’s body and a teenager’s mind. You may be at college and not with mom and dad for the first time. Last Friday was your first beer or shot or whatever.

We all got to experience that without the specter of someone always watching.

We learned a lot of lessons, some of them the hard way. That’s what growing-up is all about. You screw it up, learn from it, and get better.

Millennials and Gen Z in particular are being robbed of that opportunity. They are not being allowed to make mistakes because someone is always watching, and because the woke crowd demands wokeness. Now and forever.

Ellie Kemper, the spunky actress from The Office is the latest example. She recently apologized for a society ball that she went to when she was 19.

Haley Strack at The Federalist has the story.

As if the world needed another example of the absurdity of cancel culture, the leftist mob is at it again, canceling “Unbreakable: Kimmy Schmidt” and “The Office” actress Kemper for participating in a debutante ball at the age of 19, all for a crime she had no idea she was committing. Kemper apologized on Instagram Monday afternoon.

“When I was 19 years old, I decided to participate in a debutante ball in my hometown,” Kemper began. “The century-old organization that hosted the debutante ball had an unquestionably racist, sexist, and elitist past. I was not aware of the history at the time, but ignorance is no excuse. I was old enough to have educated myself before getting involved.”

Now this ball and the group, the Veiled Prophets, long ago stopped excluding blacks and jews. The group long ago distanced itself from its racist past.

But that doesn’t matter to the woke crowd online. It is essentially one strike, and you’re out.

Strack then hits the nail on the head.

If every teenager were chastised, canceled, tarred and feathered, or whatever else leftists call for these days, for ignorance, there wouldn’t be any people left to do the canceling. We’d have a real problem on our hands.

Exploiting childhood vulnerability and immaturity by making a spectacle of teenage mistakes is another on the long list of ways progressives are causing a wave of identity crises. Growth necessitates room to grow, but teenagers aren’t given any latitude to live, much less learn from life experience. Not with progressives waiting in the wings, ready to sentence teens for crimes they don’t know about until they’re receiving death threats on Twitter.

Cancel culture will never teach the kind of responsibility teenagers need to become informed, well-rounded, healthy members of society. It does teach that it’s acceptable to excoriate someone for their own humanity. Humans should be allowed and encouraged to make mistakes. It comes with the territory. To assume anything other than our own fallibility is to ultimately reject the basics of our humanity — and that’s exactly what the leftist mob wants, isn’t it? In order to create a neo-Marxist state void of all racism, sexism, personal opinion, or free speech, they must train white people to acknowledge that their humanity matters less and their mistakes matter more.

If everything is racist, then everyone is racist. If everything is racist, everything must be destroyed. See how it works?

Defenders of the woke mob, however, are trying to walk the line. They’re not trying to destroy everyone and everything. Just the people and things that are cruel.

President Obama said so in an interview with CNN.

“At least in conversations with my daughter, I think that a lot of the dangers of cancel culture and we’re just going to be condemning people all the time, at least among my daughters they will acknowledge sometimes among their peer group or in college campuses you’ll see folks going overboard,” Obama said.

The ex-president has two daughters — 19-year-old Sasha and 22-year-old Malia. Speaking of them, he added, “They have a pretty good sense of, look, we don’t want, we don’t expect everybody to be perfect,” he added. “We don’t expect everybody to be politically correct all the time, but we are going to call out institutions or individuals that… are being cruel, if they’re discriminating against people.”

So if someone’s feelings get hurt, then it’s okay to destroy them.

Look at these woke scolds, either the young ones or the grown-ups. These people are miserable. They can’t be having fun. They are depressing and depressed. That is what happens when you live in constant fear of making a mistake. Young people feel pressured to live the Instagram life, feel pressured to get into the best schools, and now are being pressured to live according to the wokeness of the day.

That strips them of an authentic period of growing up. We need to change, we need to evolve, we need to learn from our past mistakes. That is all necessary. No one wants to be the same person today as they were when they were 19, 20, or even younger.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

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