Celebrate diversity by conforming!
Eldon Kao
Picture taken by me in Florence, Italy. 2014.
The ever increasing momentum of the LGBTQ movement in the 21st century owes much of its sweeping success to the internet and its ability to rally and give voice to a global community. The internet provides a cheap, broad and instantaneous campaign tool for any disenfranchised group looking to sway public opinion. Surely any technology that advocates diversity is a good thing but in a new world of online bullying and insatiable vigilantism, who can distinguish between equality and conformity? Nowadays, a modest transgression that would have previously been an action chalked up to someone who was just out of touch is now mob inducing and relentlessly vilified. What happens when the technologically savvy decide to focus less on being sympathetic and more on being punitive? In an era where viral videos and memes enter our collective conscious as quickly as they leave, living in the real world where the pace and appetite for change is low can be particularly jarring. Enforcing an opinion, no matter how just is nothing short of Totalitarianism. If there is only room for one perspective, whose is it shall we follow? Diversity is a rainbow, you can’t have the reds without the blues and sometimes greatness is born from the outliers. Although the converse is also true, it is up to the majority to tolerate and liberate the few from their ignorance not to condemn.