“Woke?”
“Woke” is a bad thing?
If you ask someone on the far right, being “woke” is almost as bad as being a child molester. It’s a lot worse than those peaceful tourists who visited Washington on January 6th, 2010.
Being “woke” is … wait for it … un-American.
So exactly what is “woke?”
So being “woke” in modern-day America means being aware of discrimination past and present. Racist things like chattel slavery, lynching and Jim Crow laws. Sexist things like discrimination against women. Discrimination against LGBTQ individuals, expressed most strongly these days in the battle over how transgender individuals should be treated.
Sometimes “wokeness” goes overboard, usually when we try to punish famous people for being part of their times and yes, flawed. As with people who want to change the name of George Washington University because the first president owned slaves, or those who want to trash Thomas Jefferson because of his relationship with Sally Hemings.
Those two men in particular are individuals without whom there might not even be a United States of America. If we judge them and their contemporaries by 21st century standards, pretty much everybody is going to come up short.
We could do what New York City did with its elementary schools — no names, just numbers. Of course then only one school would be able to say accurately, “We’re Number One.”
Some names aren’t even that controversial to drop.
“I used to go to O.J. Simpson Junior High. but now I go to Middle School No. 32.”
So no Ted Bundy Elementary Schools and no Dennis Rader Community Centers. Commit murder, especially if you kill more than one person, and you’re off the list.
Others aren’t so easy, especially when there are hidden agendas involved. But it certainly seems to me that taking up arms against the United States ought to be a disqualifier. It’s why you can travel coast to coast and border to border and never see a school named for Benedict Arnold.
Actually there are still a huge number of facilities named after folks who were traitors to America. Most of them fought for the Confederacy from 1861-65.
More lies have been told to gild the lily for these Confederate generals than most people could even imagine. Robert E. Lee wasn’t a bad person by most accounts, but if you were to listen to most of what has been said about him, you might think he was Jesus’ young American cousin.
So if we really are to be “woke” — not a bad thing to be — who do we name our schools after and who gets our statues?
I mean, there are only so many things we can name after Abraham Lincoln.
I think it truly does come down to accepting people in the context of their own time. Theodore Roosevelt was a great man and a great president, but there are people who scorn him because he was a big game hunter.
Franklin Roosevelt probably saved American capitalism in the 1930s, but his name is anathema to the far right.
And as far as minorities go, it would be nice to see something other than streets in bad neighborhoods named after Martin Luther King.
I wouldn’t recommend naming anything after the previous president other than maybe a payday loan business.
I think the best way to be “woke” isn’t to attack otherwise good people — previous president excepted — who made mistakes, but simply to accept that we know better now and we ought to strive to be better.
That’s the “woke” I’d like to see.