Young generation's 'vegan fascism' puts their feelings above the sometimes harsh reality of life – Kate Copstick

Too many people seem happy to try to ban things that ‘traumatise’ them

The Stand Comedy Club cancelled a talk by SNP MP Joanna Cherry after staff complained, but backed down after a threat of legal action (Picture: Kate Chandler)

My father, Robert, loved to see me writing 'properly' for The Scotsman. He died on April 7. Now, writing this, it is very much a question of “if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

I am, in my heart, with Galileo Galilei and George Berkeley, and, now my father is no longer sentient, all the trees I might fell are soundless. I unreservedly apologise to all of you readers, but the fact is that my father was simply the greatest living human being. Possibly ever. However, I am, obviously, delighted you are here.

I am currently in Kenya, doing my Mama Biashara thing, and without Dad to speak to every day, I feel pointless, hollow, and alone. But this is just me. Only I am feeling this. And it is for me to sort that out. I cannot stop the world uttering the name Robert or ban the playing of his favourite music because it upsets me. Which brings me to my point. (Quick side note: the weather here is so grey and sodden I have taught my Mama B friends the word 'dreich'. Quite the cultural ambassador, me.)

I wade, metaphorically and literally, through endless days filled with women and their children desperately trying to escape beatings, rape, FGM, being sold off in early marriage, starvation and, more often than you might want to imagine, death. Mama B rescues, relocates and sets these women up in great, sustainable, expandable group businesses. So, in practical terms, objectively, we help, we fix, we do something.

There have been responses to my Kenya Diaries asking me not to talk about the things I do because it is too upsetting. To the readers. Over the years, my writing has been called “unnecessary” in its descriptions of things that happen here. Actually happen.

I’m just a huge fan of reality. And of doing something to change that reality if it is destructive. So I should not really end the day, if I can, collapsing onto my bed and checking social media to see what might be happening in the First World. I just get angry. I find myself agreeing with the wisdom of that great 21st-century philosopher, Jim Jefferies, when he said: “Millennials! You are the worst people who have ever lived!” Although Jim might have said that before Gen Z.

We are in a worrying place now, where someone simply feeling something makes it real. “I felt traumatised”, I see, is a popular reaction online to reading/hearing/seeing something with which you disagree. And that is your absolute right. Albeit, should you ever encounter an actual trauma, you may well have no feelings left to cope.

But your 'feeling' traumatised does not make whatever has caused those feelings an actual trauma, for anyone except you. Because of that, the only way to stop your feeling of trauma (other than getting a life) is to remove/stop/ban the source. Based entirely on your, reactive feeling. And you seem happy to do that. That is the dangerous path down which we hurtle. It is a kind of vegan fascism. I fear it.

Of course, every generation has its 'thing'. This seems to be a time in which 'I feel' becomes 'it is'. I was a very late hippie (pros: peaceful, great music; cons: not the greatest hygiene). Glam Rock put men of indeterminate sexuality in make-up and latex at the peak of not just acceptance, but adoration. Punk changed much for the voices of working-class musicians. But there was so much doing and not so much 'feeling'.

Back when we Boomers were born, there was so much to do. In all of the ferocious fights that were fought for female equality, decriminalisation of homosexuality, the UK’s 1965 Race Relations Act, and the 1964 US Civil Rights Act, during all the actual, physical protesting that helped stop the war in Vietnam, none of the voices that led the way simply talked about themselves, feeling upset, in the way people do now.

Maybe when you are building the house, you all pull together, but when you are merely discussing the soft furnishings people get upset if they are not 'feeling' the colour scheme. Contentious, huh? Now, I am not saying that feelings are not powerful things.

In another life, I produced a TV series called World of Pain. Yes, it did exactly what it said on the label. I interviewed the UK's premier expert on pain. Dr Nandi told me that calibrating pain is simple. “If a patient tells me he is in agony, then he is in agony.” Obviously, the good doctor spoke before his assumptive use of the male-identifying pronoun could, itself, cause 'agony'.

Back at our online cliff face, then, our “traumatised” person is “traumatised”. So far, so upsetting for them. But I am not traumatised. So why does their trauma trump my just getting on with things?

Yes, as you will have spotted, this is much the same territory as the great cancellation debate and all that goes on around it. The recent capitulation of The Stand in the battle of young staff feeling that allowing someone to say something which might well contain scientific fact, but, nevertheless fundamentally goes against what they feel, cannot be allowed (hence the cancellation of Joanna Cherry's Fringe talk) versus the actual law, gives cause for hope.

Of course, there is always an argument for changing the law, to allow ‘feeling traumatised' to be a legally valid reason to break a contract. But not yet.

For now, I am still here in the place where there is little time for recreational feeling, because there is too much need for doing. Anyone who fancies trying it really, really should. It might help. You, as well as others.

Kate Copstick is founder of women's charity Mama Biashara and a writer