(This is adapted from my 2009 book Mediactive.)

My friend and Arizona State University colleague Tim McGuire said many years ago, “The fact is one stupid mistake when you are 19 today can kill your future.”

That’s true—today, anyway, as we learn that what we do online can often be rediscovered years later. Such is the case of Alexi McCammond, who was named editor of Teen Vogue and then dethroned after anti-Asian tweets from a decade ago were uncovered.

It’s been the common wisdom for years. Back in 2009, then-President Obama told 9th graders at a Virginia school:

“I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook — because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life. And when you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff.  And I’ve been hearing a lot about young people who — you know, they’re posting stuff on Facebook, and then suddenly they go apply for a job and somebody has done a search and — so that’s some practical political advice for you right there.”

Young people make mistakes and do stupid things. So do older people, of course. Luckily for me and most of my friends, my generation’s youthful stupidities are mostly lost in the mists of time, not preserved on somewhere in the digital cloud.

But the notion of punishing someone decades later for what he or she said or did as a teenager or college student isn’t just wrong. It’s dangerous.

What matters is who you are today. If some said racist things as a teenager and is still demonstrating today that he or she harbors racist beliefs or acts in racist ways, I want no part of that person.

We’re going to have to cut each other some slack. There’s no alternative.

A journalism student of mine once asked if it was advisable to have a personal blog and, if so, to be outspoken on it. He’d apparently been warned that it could put a crimp in his future journalism career plans.

I can’t say how others would react. I do know that if I were hiring someone today I’d want to know what (not if) he or she posted online, not to find disqualifying factors but to see if that person had interesting things to say. I’d take for granted that I might find some things that were risqué or inappropriate for my current world. I’d expect to find things that would be “unjournalistic” in some ways, such as outspoken or foolish (or both) views on important people and issues. But I’d also remember my own ability, if not tendency, to be an idiot when I was that age. And I’d discount appropriately.

This is all about giving people what my friend Esther Dyson, a technology investor and seer, has called a “statute of limitations on stupidity.” If our norms don’t bend so that we can all start cutting each other more slack in this increasingly transparent society, we’ll only promote drones—the least imaginative, dullest people—into positions of authority. Now that’s really scary.

I hope we’ll make more progress on this than we’re showing at the moment. In some ways we are. Recall that it was impossible for a Catholic to be president until John F. Kennedy was elected. It was impossible for a divorced person to be elected until Ronald Reagan won. It was impossible for a former pot smoker to be president until Bill Clinton got elected. (Biden is stupidly undoing this with his firing of staffers who admit they ever used weed.) George W. Bush acknowledged having been a dissolute drunk until he was 40. And so on.

Sometime in the foreseeable future, we’ll elect a president who tweeted regularly, or had a blog or a Facebook or Instagram page when she was a teenager. By the standards of today, such a person would be utterly disqualified for any serious political job. But if we adapt as I believe we’ll have to, we’ll have grown as a society; we’ll have become not just more tolerant of flaws, but more understanding that we all have feet of clay in some respect. We’ll elect her anyway, because we’ll realize that the person she has become—and how that happened—is what counts.

How will her peers know all this? They’ll have figured it out for themselves, but they’ll have had some help, too. They’ll have been taught, from an early age.