If you type, “being silenced” into Google, the results on the oppression of what is supposed to be a basic right in this country appear endless.
Silencing of blacks, LGBTQ, women, conservatives and religious groups pop up first, many having struggled since the beginning of press to gain basic rights and awareness, and while their representation is getting better, it is common knowledge that they are still navigating through the storm that keeps them trapped.
Yet if one keeps scrolling through the search results, there actually is not one group that is exempt from being silenced. Nobody in charge likes it when things start to get messy. No matter what the makeup or circumstances are of those below them.
Take for example a white heterosexual male turned away from working at a daycare. “I was told, point blank, ‘you’re more than qualified, but we aren’t hiring men,”’ says Michaelis Maus from Quora.
When the people that are not in charge have something to say or some way to act that might conflict with the odds, they typically do not get too far, because they are working against powers above them.
It would not be worth it to fight against the stigma that men in a capacity dealing with children are seen as unsafe or not as capable of nurturing when they could just silence him, hire a woman, and avoid all of that.
Disrupting the status quo causes chaos. The message of mass culture is a hidden one of conformity and adjustment identifying with the status quo, thus becoming a pattern of response. Maintaining the status quo is very important for the ruling classes in capitalistic societies who want to keep control of all realms and things just the way they are.
In retrospect, slavery would still exist today if nobody dared to overthrow that societal norm. When opression started to become apparent, black rights and awareness began to be filtered out of newspapers, speeches, schools—anywhere, really.
Even now, the amount of lives lost and tortured over multiple decades of fighting were a cost I am not sure could have been any higher.
Though today, the girth of the uphill battle to fight suppression is no different. Today, we have media and then the select few that control it, even when least expected.
Former Miss America Cara Mund is the last person one would expect to be silenced. Though Hollywood reporter states, “She had been left out of interviews, not invited to meetings and often called the wrong name.”
When she obliquely hinted at trouble with pageant leadership in an interview earlier this month with The Press of Atlantic City, Mund said she was swiftly punished by having her televised farewell speech cut to 30 seconds.
Mund did not have an entire band of African Americans behind her to overcome the censorship above her, and she ultimately was forced out of the running. Just like a man forced out of a daycare.
Unless someone manages to sneak past the controlling power, we never get the full story. We never really get the full experience. Instead we are filtered illusions by those above us in order to maintain the status quo.
Again, even in this country, where it was once George Carlin who said, “It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
