The headlines about Taylor Swift (who I love, full stop) and Travis Kelce (who I am growing to appreciate) are multitudinous and persistent. This morning one came across my feed that said, “Fat-Shaming, 'Ugly Girls': Travis Kelce Deletes His Unwholesome Tweets”. There’s a bunch of other headlines about the wholesome, ‘wise’, and funny Tweets of his past, but that’s the one that got pitched to me.
I read the story, in part. The consensus, and one I’ll wholeheartedly echo, is that the 20-21 year old young man who wrote those Tweets was not the most enlightened.
My friends, I was also an idiot at 20 and believed a lot of currently socially inappropriate things, and held fat-phobic ideas, and thank all the gods I got older and wiser. The fact he or someone on Team Travis went through and deleted insensitive Tweets of the past does not change my feelings about the tight end. It would be amazing if there was some sort of apology, but maybe reliving the stupid things we said years and years ago is not the way to absolution.
There is no such thing as absolution.
But there are billions of ways to do better, be better. And maybe current actions matter more than past offenses. It’s not the most popular way of thinking in these United States, where the court of public opinion will slaughter careers and the courts of the judiciary function jail people for herbal medicine used for centuries, but cool cool. Maybe we’ll get better.
Every time I see a headline where a celebrity is being called out for behavior or words from a decade or more ago, I wonder if the reporters could be held up for the worst thing they’ve ever done and asked to answer for decisions made prior to a fully developed prefrontal cortex. Or every bad decision made under the influence. Or every fight picked with a sibling or parent. I’m not advocating automatic forgiveness for pain inflicted or abuses rendered— I just firmly believe that the collective culture of socially acceptable behavior is vastly different every few years, for the better, generally, and there will necessarily be a learning curve. And we’re living a very well documented era.
I’m passionate about kindness, and I love to see love happening, and I think Mr. T. Kelce will likely continue to show the world how well adjusted a person can become when they go from NFL-star-selling-Campbell’s-Chunky-Soup-famous to OMG-he-just-kissed-Taylor-Swift-famous. I hope everyone is as happy as they can be, and that the internet doesn’t shred the guy too much. It’s vicious out there. I also look forward to the next T. Swift album, as I’m sure she can weave some third down conversion vibes into a song.
May we all be regarded as better than our mistakes.
Have a great day, friends.