Cancellation and the void

Something of myself for someone I never knew

By Anonymed (an anonymous Canadian Doctor)

Roseanne Barr recently gave an interview to The Megyn Kelly Show in which she opined that her ABC handlers had hoped she would kill herself after she was fired and expunged from her own television show. A few years ago, the famous comic had rebooted her eponymous 1980s sitcom, Roseanne, to considerable fanfare. At the time of her firing, the show was rated Number 1. One night, apparently compromised by sleeping pills, she tweeted that former Obama senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, looked like, “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby.” Jarrett is black, and while I believe Barr probably did think she was white, as she claimed, the invocation of “apes” was fatal.

Barr’s cancellation wasn’t novel. This was 2017 and Trump-Very Fine People hysteria was in full swing. People were regularly “de-platformed” for offending the sensibilities of the Left. But we hadn’t yet seen the mass cruelty and gleeful vengeance that would come to characterize the George Floyd-BLM era. Still, for that single act, Barr was summarily destroyed. She was completely othered, ostracized, shamed and, to the extent she ever belonged to it, removed from polite society. There was no mercy.

It has often been said that Imperial Germany’s treatment of enemy civilians in World War I foreshadowed the Nazis’ breathtaking inhumanity two decades later. The comparison is hyperbolic of course, but the treatment of heretics in the years leading up to George Floyd’s death presaged the “racial reckoning” witch-hunts to come. Even then though, cancellation was ruthless. When Roseanne says she believed some people wanted her to kill herself, or at least created the conditions by which this might reasonably happen (particularly given her well-known mental health issues), I believe her. They may not have actively encouraged her death, as we have seen sociopathic teenagers do, but at what point does cruel indifference to a person’s declining emotional state constitute a nod and a wink that maybe the world would be better off without them?

The “someone I never knew” isn’t actually Roseanne Barr in case you were wondering (though I don’t know her either), but a man named Richard Bilkszto. As many readers will now know, Richard was a high school principal who recently took his own life - in large part, it seems, as a result of professional and personal humiliation suffered at the hands of DEI apparatchiks. I didn’t know Richard, but reading about his case is viscerally enraging, and the reaction to his death understandably strong. However, since hearing of his passing, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that there is still insufficient outrage at what transpired.

I understand why people say that what happened is a “tragedy”, but for me it’s not enough. Cancer is a tragedy. Car accidents are a tragedy. Drownings are a tragedy. Tragedy happens. But malice happens to you. There is a different term for what happened to Richard (and to countless others) and that is a crime. Too legalistic? How about ruination? The Agenda host Steve Paikin, who had interviewed Bilkzto a mere three months before his suicide, tweeted that he hoped there would be an “investigation” into the circumstances surrounding his death. I’m sure Paikin doesn’t think there was active foul-play involved, but he’s still right. There should be an investigation. We hear endlessly about the trans suicide epidemic that will inevitably flow from concern about “gender-affirming care” and other alleged “transphobia.” Well, why wouldn’t the same reasoning apply to the vengeful diversity bureaucrats and their lemmings who regularly steal livelihoods, careers, reputations and, perhaps most importantly, dignity, without a thought? Are they not, by some measure, responsible?

Like Richard, I know what it means to be canceled - and I know what it means to be haunted by it. I haven’t spoken publicly about my own experiences with the woke mob - and probably won’t in the immediate future - but I will say that when all of it first transpired, it was a shock to the system unlike anything I had ever experienced. When you’re isolated, harassed, and the whole world turns on you, including friends and colleagues who ought to know better, you become dissociated. I had heard tell of people, having been doxxed and harassed on social media and defamed in the mainstream, becoming excessively paranoid - afraid to leave their homes. I now know the feeling. For a while, I could barely go to the grocery store. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I could barely put one foot in front of the other. I was prone, as depressed people often are, to outbursts of tears, to nausea and to various other psychosomatic manifestations of acute stress. I knew about panic attacks, and had spoken to many patients who experience them regularly, but I was still convinced I was having a heart attack and a stroke at the same time when I finally did have one. The kicker was, I didn’t feel that I could even go to the hospital if I wanted to, since that’s where all those people who had discarded me for their own ends were located. I was completely cut off - social and professionally. As the mob grew larger and more public, there was nary a word of concern from my institution or from those who, just weeks prior, had proudly supported me as a doctor and colleague and friend. Things were bad, and for the first time in my life, I couldn’t get a hold of my mind. I couldn’t reason my way through.

I didn’t have a history of mental health issues, but I now know what it is to stare into the abyss - to truly believe death would be a mercy. Were it not for my wife and children, things might have turned out rather differently. I also know what it’s like to feel that people are trying to push you to the end. Medicine is a notoriously high pressure profession. Suicide rates among physicians, woke mobs aside, are extremely high relative to the general population. The stakes are sufficiently large, and the stress sufficiently endless, that not a year goes by without a medical student, resident or even staff physician succumbing to despair. This happens for reasons big and small. Sometimes it's the work and the trauma that can come with it. Sometimes it's as simple as failing to “match” (that is, be chosen for the specialty of one’s choice) or being held back a year in medical school. Given this reality, I don’t see how those who actively sought to ruin my life in the name of their newfound ideology could conclude anything but that I might be a risk to myself. They knew dismissal would have been more than the loss of a job. It would have been the end of a career - including years of work, sacrifice, and mountains of debt - before it really began. Staring that in the face, alone, was an out-of-body experience. In that moment, the solace of the void beckoned.

In Dave Chappelle’s 2019 special, Sticks and Stones, the legendary comedian opens with a bit about suicide. In typical Chappelle fashion, he slowly builds a story of someone he once knew - a bright, Yale-bound overachiever, who, through a series of unfortunate relationships and some bad choices, winds up throwing his potential away. He recounts to the audience how he recently ran into this person, someone he once greatly admired, while buying sneakers. The man was now over forty and working as a manager at the Footlocker where Chappelle was shopping. He then contrasts this man’s lot with the (by all accounts) charmed life of well-known chef and travel documentarian, Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain had recently taken his own life shortly after completing an episode of his popular show, Parts Unknown, in the Canadian province of Newfoundland (after which, incidentally, he was called a bigot for having lovingly-used the term “Newfie”). 

The crux of the joke is actually a prescient commentary on mental health and the minds we inhabit. Bourdain had everything - a dream job, fame, money, and his physical health. He was also white, which is apparently better than all of those things combined. And yet he took his own life. Chappelle’s former acquaintance, the poor Black Footlocker manager with all his dreams unrealized, “never even thought about killing himself.” He then brings the house down, musing that, “maybe he should have thought a little more about it.”

As with all great comedy, there is an important question there. What makes some impervious to the cruel whims of life and others less-so? Why do blessed and successful people succumb to despair while many who have every reason to see life as meaningless do not? The answer is obviously complicated. In medicine, we look at things in terms of established risk factors - age, sex, substance use, support network, depression, physical health - but sometimes we just don’t know. In the end, our minds are all we have. Everyone has the potential to break if they lose enough. I know that now, and it was arrogant to have ever thought otherwise. For some, it is the loss of a loved one. For others, the loss of a promised future. For still others, it is the loss of hope. Hope for a greater meaning. Hope for a better tomorrow. Hope for a second chance. Hope for redemption.

Gyorgy Konrad once wrote that, “lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses.” This is certainly true, but it is also true that some losses cannot be compensated for. There are parts of us that cannot be reclaimed - where the only question is, can I live with it? I don’t know Richard Bilkszto or his mind. I only know what the loss of dignity and autonomy can do to a person. Perhaps, humbly, we had that in common. Perhaps we are both more Bourdain than the Footlocker guy. I can’t presume to know. But we have both stared into that void. That he did not come back incurs no judgment - only anger and sorrow. Only that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when a great evil has been done. I never knew the man. I wish I had. Rest in peace.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Benevolence and Malevolence: How will our woke revolutionaries be remembered?

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