I’ve got to be honest.
When you’re on the far side of 70, , there are so many things that seem foolish or silly.
The outrage over being “woke,” for example.
As I understand it, being “woke” ties in with such conservative bugaboos as “critical race theory” and “pronouns.”
The way I was educated as a youth back in the day, at least two of those three are fairly simple and innocuous.
Woke?
When your alarm goes off in the morning, you go from “asleep” to “woke.”
Pronouns?
These are simple words that replace nouns
As in “Melvin is a very good boy” becoming “He is a very good boy.”
Of course those aren’t the meanings infuriating the rabid right. “Woke” refers to becoming aware of things people would just as soon you didn’t know. Such as learning in a history class that white people benefitted from chattel slavery.
Or other excuses.
So that’s where “woke” comes into play.
But “pronouns” seems even sillier, especially since the people annoyed by it doesn’y even seem to know what pronouns are or what they do.
Take Elon Musk, for example.
Prosecute is a verb, Fauci is a noun although I suppose if you are the richest man in the world, you get some leeway here.
Pronouns are words that replace nouns, such as “he” replacing “Elon,” and apparently what bothers the right wing so much is when a transgendered person whose given name might be “Bob” would say that their pronouns are “she/her.”
The only time I remember the whole pronoun deal becoming at all humorous was back in the early 1980s when my late grandfather had surgery for testicular cancer (he wasn’t late at the time).. The surgeon removed his testicles and my grandfather said that was the day he became an it.
He was smart enough to describe it correctly.
Then again, he wasn’t a Republican.
Two losing Republicans in the 2022 cycle missed on pronouns, althought one of them go it hald right.
Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, pushing hard to be Trump’s mate — running or otherwise — in 2024 despite losing her race, said her pronouns were “I won,” which is either 50 percent right or 25 percent right depending on whether you’re counting words or letters.
She also said, “To watch them steal this in broad daylight and if they think they are going to get away with it, they messed with the wrong bitch.”
Then there was poor pathetic Herschel Walker in the Senate race here in Georgia. He said he wasn’t sure about his own pronouns. but the pronouns for his opponent, incumbent senator Rafael Warnock, were “former senator.”
Neither word a pronoun, of course.
As I said earlier, once you’re past 70, a lot of things seem silly. Still, for the most part there’s nothing wrong with calling people what they want to be called.
Although I draw the line at “stable genius.”