Hemna Hypothesized

Cancel culture has lost the plot. What was once meant to hold others accountable is now a guise to target anyone vulnerable. Canceling started with the right intentions, to de-platform those who perpetuate problematic, biased, or hateful behavior. However, this phenomenon reveals the inconsistencies in our society.  Firstly, those who cancel often don’t understand the immense impact of their words. This is an online thing, therefore it stays on the internet forever and will drastically change a person’s life. Cancel culture is being used as an outlet to normalize giving a person an unnecessary amount of hate. Anyone who doesn’t comply with this trend of lacking empathy is isolated from others. This contributes to the increase of the herd-like mentality. What’s the point of canceling if no one understands the actual issue at hand and just knows that they do not like them? Canceling is very selective and biased. Two people can do problematic or similar things yet only one person rec...

It took me a long time to start embracing my name. It is different in every single way. I’ve never seen anyone else in both America and India have my name, I felt isolated. Being born and growing up in America, I didn’t understand the significance of my name and why my parents would choose it out of everything else. It has to do with my birth star (I still don’t understand this). Hema means gold and Hemna means the golden one. This name is so special but I didn’t like that at all, I wanted to be like everyone else. I tried to correct people who mispronounced my name in kindergarten but I felt like I was inconveniencing everyone and didn’t want people to see how different I was having a “harder” name. It took me years later to finally start forcing my friends to say my name correctly as my view began to shift. My name isn’t something I should hide or take lightly. It was picked for a reason and isn’t meaningless no matter how much Western cultural norms try to make me think. Like the ti...

A week ago, the Onion published an article titled, “Christians Explain How Jesus Would Handle The Border Crisis.” I chose to analyze this article as the topic at hand White American Christians and their opinions on the mistreatment of non-white people pertains to the real world such as what is going on in Palestine. I agree with the article because the lack of empathy from followers of a religion based on principles like empathy is astonishing. The piece opens up by giving context to the issue at hand, the migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border through the rhetorical mode description. The author follows this by discussing how a predominantly Christian nation thinks Jesus would view the situation, allowing the audience to visualize a general idea of what to expect. The author sets the audience to expect the Christians to be empathetic and to wish good fortune through a sarcastic tone and phrases like “reasonable.” The piece shifts to an ironic and critical tone by listing the various o...