~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The word “woke” has been bandied about for a brief while (at least to me), and in the back of my mind it means something about finally “getting it,” whatever it is. It’s in the category of yesterday being innocent, today being informed: “I awoke to what is really going on.”
In the Oxford, one of the means is awareness of social issues. In 2017, that dictionary widened its definition to mean “alert to injustice in society, especially racism.”
Which means the far right does want injustice, so the religious right/white supremacy/Christian democracy use woke as a “bad” word; its relationship to anything in the history of America must therefore be obliterated.
A “bad” word in colloquial usage is a word used in profane, scatological, mean, disparaging, taunting ways – and it can be any word: mother, god, the Christ, fast, slow. That the far right, pushing the country toward their way of thinking about religion, education, language, sex, democracy and the Wizard of Oz have co-opted “woke,” along with “CRT” (critical race theory), among many others to actually “woke” people to their way of being woke.
It’s laughable.
But they’re serious. Even though the far right and its leaders – Trump, DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the others of this ilk– have followers, it is a minuscule number compared with the total population, many of whom are bored with politics, sick of politics, hurt by politics, don’t know what politics means; these are Republicans, Dems, no-party, busy, lazy, entrepreneurial, creative, criminal, religious, smart, not smart, curious, sleepy.
The far right is ambitious, hard-charging, willing to lie; and I am not sure what they want if they don’t want a democracy, which is the only way to lead a country so that we can all be involved.
We aren’t that good at it yet, but it beats a plutocracy (run by money people who look down on non-money people), or an autocracy (run by a power person and his/her toadies, possibly a sociopath or narcissist, a religious, a racist, a xenophobic, a vegan, all who want you to be the same or be put in prison for not doing what they like to do.)
Whoever is in charge right now – our current Rs and Ds and FRs (far rights), not much is working. They’re all bent on their own ideas of not letting children of gay parents say the word “gay”; of not letting women have control of their own eggs although not one word is said about men’s gazillion sperms; and deciding if we should or should not stop Putin flat out; or fluttering around Climate Change as if the future is a game we aren’t inclined to play.
I can’t read the news much anymore because it’s mostly run by Capitalism, one of the problems, unless it is reined in with its brother Socialism to keep them both from killing each other and us and our democracy in the process – capitalism because it’s greedy and socialism because it has no clue how to capitalize on all the good things they are.
I hear that Ralph Nader has a new newspaper – real paper, not online, no ads slipping across the screen on all sides so that pretty soon we’re forced to read a postage-stamp size breaking news story that’s crowded by health tips, celebrity break-ups, crime and obits. Nader, in his serious way, has brought us back to the real deal – what needs to be fixed by our Congress, what Americans really want, new news, true news, in depth, not a press release from the rat-like “pushers” scurrying through the hall of the Congress with their sly demands.
Soon, if it’s not already happened, the FR will have condemned The Capitol Hill Citizen, the paper newspaper, as “woke.”
For just that reason, read it. Who cares what the unwokes think? If they don’t want to be woke, let them freeze on a passing iceberg. Mean-spirited, anti-facts, anti-science, anti-brain, anti-smart — exactly what they prefer to be: “unwoke.” It is a synonym for asleep.
Who would have thought the woke would be brow beat by the unwoke. It goes against common sense. Goodwill. Loving kindness. Education. Science.
