"I hope cancel culture keeps expanding and more and more people get canceled, because then eventually everyone will get canceled and it will mean nothing and we'll just have a reset. Cancel culture is inevitably a self-canceling proposition," Meghan Daum once told Katie Herzog.

And I agree with Daum more than I do naysayers about cancel culture or people who believe cancel culture can be used to instill social good. Although there is no official definition of cancel culture, it is often a cultural boycott and excommunication from the public sphere, after perceived wrongdoing. In liberal, PC, woke intelligentsia, a sphere I am a product of and that I actively participate in, cancel culture is often used after a #MeToo episode or a comment about race, gender, or sexuality that is backwards and deserves to be called-out.

I think cancel-culture comes with a lot of good intentions. While the criminal justice system and police system often move justice in a direction that's counterintuitive or just don't do enough, cancel culture is a way of taking justice into the hands of ourselves. It is a way to move the world into a utopian ideal we see fit.

But what we often fail to acknowledge is how good it makes us feel, almost as if canceling someone does more good for ourselves than it does for society. Comedian Sarah Silverman, two months ago, called cancel culture "righteousness porn," and she's right to do so. It's addictive to cancel someone else for their wrongdoing. Silverman, however, made the comment amidst admitting some of her regrettable moments, particularly performing in blackface in a show about race. She reflected that she knew it was wrong, and she hoped she could one day be forgiven.

I believe that cancel culture is bad, but not for the reasons we might think:

It only calls out the behavior that is public, that is viral.

Ray Rice brutally punched his fiancee in an elevator, but I know for sure that domestic violence is an epidemic, and there are incidents as bad, if not worse, that don't go publicized. I know the same thing happens in relationships that I've known and seen. Public racist comments are bad, but as an inner-city teacher in Baltimore City, I see just as egregious, if not more dangerous displays of racism when drivers in my city curse out squeegee boys, young window washers at busy intersections that are predominantly African-American. I think Waze giving an alert about squeegee boys on its app is as egregious as any public racist comment.

For me, I've seen some of my students as squeegee boys before. For me, that kind of behavior directed towards kids like my students is as racist and more personal than any Trump tweet.

And I see that happen every day.

"Rick Leandry knows that some drivers passing through downtown Baltimore have never seen a poor, black child before — so when one comes knocking on the car window, it can be shocking," reported Lillian Reed of the Baltimore Sun.

I thought about Herzog's article about cancel culture, and Daum's quote at the very end of Herzog's article. The problem of cancel culture, for me, isn't that it's reductionist. It isn't that it's imperfect and only works on certain people.

Daum and Herzog make the crucial point that cancel culture only works when it's from your own ideological side. That's why Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh are not only still standing after sexual assault allegations, but flourishing, and why comics accused of much less egregious acts, like Louis C.K. and Shane Gillis, are not.

The problem with cancel culture is that it only targets what's public and extremely visible, not the invisible that is day-to-day life.

I hear the counterargument that taking down a highly public target, like Ray Rice or Louis C.K., sets an example for other people and helps change the conversation. Yes, there are thousands, if not millions of batterers out there as bad if not worse than Ray Rice. Yes, there are thousands, if not millions of people who have abused power and disrespected women as badly as Louis C.K. had.

The counterargument is that you have to make a martyr so people know what can happen to you if you do the same thing.

But I just don't see it as that helpful, especially with my observations, in my highly traumatized city and profession, because the worst offenses will always be the ones that are invisible, not public. That isn't to say we should lose hope for humanity, because even Ray Rice is still married to his wife, Janay Palmer, and has repented and renounced football as his idol.

We all knew then, however, when the TMZ video in the elevator was leaked in 2014, it was about much more than Ray Rice.

"Rice became, overnight, a global symbol of male rage, celebrity entitlement, and the NFL's extremely broken moral compass," writes Josh Dean of Men's Journal.

With cancel culture, it takes regular people, good people, to propagate the invisible injustices. I often tell people, as someone who grew up in the north but went to college in the south, that the north is just as racist as the south. Just because de facto segregation isn't as visible as the heinous historical acts of racism in the south, from lynchings to Bull Connor unleashing dogs and firehoses at Civil Rights activists, the north is just as racist. You don't have to look far into the north's school and housing zoning policy to see subtle, modern-day segregation at work.

"I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hateful as I've seen here in Chicago," Martin Luther King once said, after a crowd threw bricks, stone, and bottles at him in Chicago.

And who is it that's propping up societal inequalities, from racism to misogyny to homophobia to poverty? It's not them. It's not a few isolated, rogue individuals. It's us.

Tell me that you don't want people in your family to live in better neighborhoods that are safer, with notably more white people and fewer minorities. Tell me that you don't want your kids and kids in your family to go to good, and noticeably more white schools. Tell me that you aren't glad that you feel safe that the place you go on your morning runs, that you go out in on Friday and Saturday nights is more gentrified. Tell me that you don't have a shameful social media chat or conversation that, if leaked to the public, you would lose your job for. Tell me that you really deserve to make tens of thousands of more dollars than the fast-food worker or custodian that probably works harder and more hours than you do.

These are natural inclinations and basic needs for us in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, from the need to feel safe to the need to belong. Yet they are sins as bad as the most egregious of acts we've seen in the news, from Ray Rice hitting Janay Palmer in the elevator, to Trump's Access Hollywood tape where he touted "grabbing women by the pussy," or the latest #MeToo moment of a celebrity brought down by abusing their power for wrongdoing. And the fact that they go unanswered for means that these natural ways "woke" people like me and my friends are hypocrites.

The fact is that it isn't those people who are perpetuating sins deserving of being canceled. It's all of us. We do and say terrible things all the time, that we deflect onto the latest public sin in the news because we don't want to answer for our own mistakes or invisible ways we perpetuate inequality. Just because our biases are implicit doesn't mean they're better.

I don't think cancel culture is an overall bad thing because I know that everyone, including myself, deserves to be canceled. And I'm not just saying this because I'm a reformed Presbyterian, but because we all have actions in our past that we have to answer for, too.

Just because our mistakes aren't as public doesn't mean that we don't deserve to be canceled because of them, and the future for a more mature society is one where every person is canceled, and we have to hit the reset button to realize fundamental truths in the flaws of the human condition.

Everyone deserves to be canceled, because once everyone is, we can look inward instead of outward, and realize we are part of the problem. It is with that self-awareness that we can finally be a part of the solution.