Mission Impossible was a 60s phenomenon. A well-crafted and suspenseful series about covert government operatives, each episode left me more and more fascinated by the curious and continued threat of their being "disavowed". How could you be "authorised" to do something one minute and a fugitive the next for doing the very thing you were instructed to do? It didn’t make sense then, and to an even greater extent, it still doesn’t now.

However, after I read a news item about The Planned Parenthood Federation parting ways with one of their founders, I found my usual unequivocal self to be strangely ambivalent. It appears that given the ongoing and well-justified focus on black lives, the association suddenly realised that Margaret Sanger’s unconscionable support of eugenics placed her firmly in Nazi territory and couldn’t disavow her quickly enough.

It was very wise move in this case, but here’s the flip side; the advent and subsequent meteoric rise of what is popularly known as ‘cancel culture’. This current tendency to write people off just because we don’t agree with them - without weighing their thoughts and actions against any standards but our own - is all kinds of wrong. How on earth did we get here?

Don’t get me wrong! I’m a great fan of lively debates, and have even been known to provoke one or two myself!! But the joy for me is in the actual discussion. Hearing others‘ thoughts; trying to see where they’re coming from; offering one’s two cents; meeting each other half-way... This is how dialogue begins and results in the rule of law.

Long before God gave us the ten commandments, people were living together in settlements; not because they were related, but because it was the safest and most sensible thing to do. They were able to put aside the things that could have permanently prevented any notion of unity, and instead concentrate on what they had in common. In the same way, our disparateness should encourage dialogue, not diatribes.

We all know that one person who waits until everyone else has had their say and then puts the final seal on the convo. It’s maddening, but we love them, and so ignore it. Attention-seeking-cum-one-upmanship doesn’t blot out all their other good qualities - plus the rest of us are nowhere near any type of sainthood.

However, think of the consequences when this behaviour goes overboard. When it feels like some crazy experiment in an underground lab has resulted in a super-race of egocentrics with a pathological desire to be recognised as right at any cost. The danger to us right now is that the rise of such movements lend credence to dictatorships - religious and secular, historical and modern.

Xerses - the Achaemenid king who married the orphan Esther and unwittingly saved the lives of innumerable Jews - actively discouraged people from approaching him uninvited by threatening them with death. A brilliant tactic used by all dictators who don’t want to be called out. “If I don’t hear it, it’s not really happening.” “If I can stop you from saying/writing/singing it, it’s a non event”

Angry young people in Thailand are bravely ignoring the country’s frightening lèse-majesté laws, which demand total and silent allegiance to the crown, by speaking out against a monarch who lays more emphasis on reverence than well-being. Surprisingly only because of his own questionable behaviour. The fix? Show the naysayers to be the problem, thereby cancelling them before they cancel you.

Cancel culture is simply a posh name for various degrees of bullying and an almost infallible way to hide our own inadequacies. What is so wrong about people having opposing thoughts? Debate has been a stalwart of society since hunter-gatherers argued about whose kill was biggest and best.

A good friend is a staunch Trump supporter, while I... Well, let’s not go there. Bottom line, she's entitled to her views, and I to mine. That shouldn’t and doesn’t make us persona non grata to each other.

I’m not a fan of witchcraft in any form, but Harry Potter aside, I have to admire J. K. Rowling for standing her ground in the ongoing row about menstruation and bathroom sharing with regards to trans women. You can be anything you like, but don’t let it detract from what other people are or fear might happen to them.

Does it speak to knowing right from wrong? Most definitely. Without that we are all eternally doomed. To think otherwise would be amoral. I am wholly against racism and the ongoing issues surrounding it - the idolatrous nature of statues of slave masters; the horror that was the Tuskagee Trials; the seemingly wilful attempt to exterminate black men; the Henrietta Lacks experiment... However, race is just one factor in the continuing battle against injustice. We also face poverty, sexual assault, misogyny and ageism, to name but a few.

With this aggravated and insidious form of hectoring, it’s not enough for me to not like what you say, how you look, what you do. For maximum satisfaction and damage I need to whip up a storm of umbrage and hatred so strong that victims are left stunned, speechless, and shirking the limelight. Who does that? And would you want to know someone who does? If we all called each other to account, perhaps sanity might return.

I admit it’s a hard one. Karen's actually believe that the world is their oyster, (filled with clinically white pearls). Birthers still maintain Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Divers fans are convinced that Elvis never left the building... Is it really worth arguing with any of them?

This is a time for dialogue. For round table discussions and an exchange of ideas. The deeply divisive nature of Us and Them has no place in the 21st century. Elementary arithmetic class is where you learn that 1-1=0.

In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul tells us to, "Do all that you can to live in peace with everyone." While this is by no means easy, the alternative - all 7.8 billion of us cancelling each other out - makes it the only viable one. We cannot simply erase people. Saying that we can takes us into jealousy-fed-by-insecurity territory, revealing our vindictiveness rather than social concern.

To echo a character in the 1996 movie, Broken Arrow, who is more worried that there is a name for a stolen nuclear warhead than the fact that it is actually missing; how is it possible that something so insidious now has a name? Let us sincerely hope that fact doesn’t make it more difficult for it to go the way of all other fads.