Woke?

Woke: It is Trump’s obsession or maybe just another word to distract us like “poison” or “Greenland.” MAGA has made a mantra of this word that represents something they claim they hate: Woke. The Right has demonized it, the Left has embraced it. Those of us in the middle are left shaking their heads.

When I think of this thing called Woke, oddly enough I think of Sixteen Candles, a great coming of age movie from the 1980s. Sixteen Candles has now been cancelled, largely because of a stereotypical Chinese character*. It’s stupid lowbrow humor…but it’s a joke. Honestly, I’m more worried about extreme weather and Elon Musk having access to all that information and money than a bad stereotype. I’m more worried about the people Trump has picked for his cabinent than personal pronouns—

But, when I think of “Woke,” I also think of George Floyd and all the other people of color murdered by the police. I think of people in positions of power like Weinstein who sexually assaulted people because they believed they could. I also think about how I am—like many people with Southern heritage—the product of rape, of a white slave owner inpregnating a black woman.

Woke serves a purpose, it is nothing to be vilified—

But the Progressives have taken it too far. Someone is always getting offended by a stupid joke or if you innocently misidentify someone’s gender. My old school spent a whole lot of money rebranding itself because it was named after a questionable man (Sir Francis Drake)—that money could have gone to food banks or shelters for abused woman or something. All this energy pulling down statues or tagging them could be spent more productively on issues facing us in the present and future. Also, we need these statues of questionable men to remind of us of the enemy, to give past wrongs a face and that face is often an ordinary one, one that can blend in with the crowd…or a reality show.

You can’t force someone to not follow their true nature. You can’t change a racist by a blanket cancellation. If anything, human nature dictates that individual will double down, to clutch those beliefs more tightly, to protest that their rights are being infringed on. Trump understands this and he plays a fitting tune. By being inflexible—Left and Right—we are distracted, distracted from the people who are a genuine adversary, people like these billionaires who really run the country—and have acquired even more power under Trump. Those are the people all of us—Left and Right—need to come together to defeat….

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*There is one dodgy bit about Sixteen Candles, it is when Jake Ryan suggests Farmer Ted have his way with Jake’s passed out drunk girlfriend. That is bad...