Much to the displeasure of baby boomers, most of us who grew up or were born in the 21st century have educated ourselves about biases and prejudices ingrained in society and their negative effects on the world. They’ve realized that without them, we can progress to a better world. These kids have opened their minds and are ready to eradicate prejudices and make sure that we can live in a truly equal world.

But somewhere along the way, we’ve lost sight of what being social justice activists are; they are supposed to be accepting and understanding and fight for people. As the ideologies of today’s average activists become more complex, the culture and stigma attached to them is beginning to overshadow their good intentions.

Liberal activists started out with the idea of being inclusive and trying to make sure that true equality could become a reality in the world. But as radical activism increased in popularity, these activists began exhibiting a conservative mentality. It isn’t a true conservatism – a mentality that allows no room for opinions other than one idea – but rather a sort of neo-conservatism in which they promote the same beliefs, but in a fashion that is counteractive and doesn’t help the movement.

This is expressed in a multitude of ways. When someone disagrees with an online activist, the backlash they receive is horrifying. In order to come out as the winner, they could bring up their past or just dance around the topic. To justify the reasons they have for not liking celebrities, people might bring up tweets or things that they’ve said far into their past with the obvious implication that no one will be the same person they were five years ago. If we judged people based on what they did and said at age 10, very few of us would be “unproblematic.”

The idea of being unproblematic is as unrealistic as being flawless and god-like. The concept just isn’t plausible because humans by nature are problematic beings and very few living things on this planet aren’t (see: dogs). Almost all of our thoughts are results of the society that we live in, and unlearning things that have been ingrained in our minds since day will never really end. It really won’t be finished until we reach a world that is truly past that issue. This doesn’t mean that humans can’t be nice and good. It’s just the idea of either being problematic or unproblematic isn’t something that’s healthy and can be seen as anxiety-inducing.

Social justice workers and activists have accomplished many things recently, like the protests in Ferguson and acceptance of people who identify as LGBT+. They’ve influenced how many of us, including me, see and react about the world. But we can’t lose ourselves in trying to achieve these noble causes like fighting discrimination or creating a society that is truly equal. We have to keep our heads and understand what we are fighting against before being able to effectively eradicate it. Reaching out to and changing people’s viewpoints on controversial topics requires realizing why people think in these ways and how to convince them without belittling them. The things that we are all trying to achieve isn’t far off, we just need to get there with the least amount of carnage.