As soon as Trump was elected, the resistance began. Trump supporters called us many names, including “snowflakes.” Throughout 2017, the snowflakes grew in number and energy, creating a blizzard. One of the most powerful storms: The Me Too Movement.
A spotlight has now been shined on the open-secret incubation of sexual predators across workplace environments. Coddled from legal and professional consequences because they were “high performers,” these powerful men indulged in flexing illegal power since they made money for their corporate pimps who protected them.
Yet, I’d love it, if, just for once, one of these powerful men, an open-secret sexual assaulter, would be as explicitly honest as he was when he explicitly trolled for his victims, and confess, “Well, in the past when I’d flash my penis, talk dirty, grope someone or act out any other of my deviant sexual machinations at the workplace, I was never blamed for my own actions. My career never suffered because my victims were always blamed, never quite believed, and their careers were either diminished or ended as a result of my behavior; so I thought that occasionally paying for their silence and departure, although it wasn’t an admission of guilt on my part, was just the cost of doing business.
“Then, something changed. I’ve heard that the election of our current president triggered it. Whatever the case, from one day to the next, I was held accountable for my own actions beyond paying hush money.
“Suddenly the same media and industry institutions that put me at the pinnacle of my field and looked the other way as I broke laws lesser men would have been imprisoned for, or at the very least fired, is now punishing me. I was untouchable, so to speak, but now I’ve lost my job. My career has imploded.”
Of course, I’m not holding my breath for such a great, revealing confession. They’re probably still swirling around thoughts about how the empires they built are collapsing, but really, every industry that these fallen titans have thrived in, still exist. How humbling it must be for them to see their pillars, their solid connections to fame, fortune and power destroyed and the industry itself continue to thrive, new pillars created to strengthen the ever-changing cultural standards, absorbing the shock of a new generation of change makers.
Once the initial shock of the beginning of the end for these crumbled pillars settle, the long-lasting consequence of their wrong-doing lie not in how the collective battle cry of #metoo waged against them, but how swiftly they were replaced. Reeling from the disillusion of their inflated self-worth, they’ve been tossed into a sexual predator tar pit and the vacuum created in their absence is being rapidly filled.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Human nature roots for the underdog. Twenty-eighteen is The Year of the Dog.
Time’s up.