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Woke Will Win

The leveraging of irrational fear is nothing new.

Throughout history it has been the go-to tactic of the worst of politics and religion.

When you lack substantive ideas, you need an encroaching enemy to move and motivate people.
When you have nothing redemptive to offer, you have to create a violent adversary for them to run from and push back against.
When vulnerable people are placed in your path, you need to somehow turn those people into a threat to be exterminated.
If you can’t or won’t engage in difficult conversations about complex issues, you turn words into monsters:
Illegals.
CRT.
Plandemic.

The jab.
Groomers.
Woke.

Turn on any Fox News show monologue, read any Right-wing hack news outlet, visit any MAGA influencer’s TikTok page, or sample any Republican politician’s social media account and you’ll find their latest ubiquitous boogeyman: “wokeness.” They clumsily shoehorn the word into every televised conversation, every incendiary think piece, every pearl-clutching press conference.

This tactic is designed to terrify their constituents, stir-up panic in the easily-manipulated, and to misdirect their from the reality that they have no actual platform outside of opposition to progress, resistance to diversity, aversion to equity, and evasion of justice.

Conservatives lament, castigate, and decry wokeness.
They passionately warn against it.
They fiercely condemn it.
They work themselves into fevered hysterics over it.
The only thing they can’t do—is define it.

When asked for specifics regarding exactly what woke is and precisely why it’s such a supposed danger, there is no response: just a swift regurgitating of talking points, buzzwords, dog whistles, and vague non sequitur warnings.

Since they don’t know it is, they resort to boycotting and banning everything: books, fast food franchises, drag performers, beer companies, big box stores, children’s play sets—all in the name of fighting an invisible terror that they can’t even name.

But we can name it:

When the rubber actually meets the road, “woke” is simply a versatile Conservative catch-all epithet for those of us who believe every America adult should have a voice in the electoral process of this nation,
for people who don’t believe a human being’s body, gender identity, or sexual orientation are anyone else’s business,
for we who are sickened at the violence against the Asian community: the direct result of the irresponsible rhetoric of a Republican president,
for Americans who are disgusted that a cancer diagnosis now often necessitates a gofundme page, because we are making illness a financial death sentence,
for people who will not abide the assassination of unarmed people of color by members of a police force infected with white supremacy,
for those who grieve the way this nation is ravaged by preventable gun violence because those who profit from it have such a stranglehold on our lawmakers—
for those of us who exhibit the slightest empathy whatsoever toward migrant families or the working poor or people of color, when we see how hostile our nation has been to them and how oppressive it still is.

It’s woke to want fair elections.
It’s woke to want accurate American history taught to children.
It’s woke to believe LGBTQ+ human beings deserve to be acknowledged.
It’s woke to be anti-racist.
It’s woke to be anti-fascist.
It’s woke to trust Science.
It’s woke to wear a mask in a pandemic.
It’s woke to be the parent of a bullied child.
It’s woke to want to be addressed with the gender you identify with.
It’s woke to want a less-polluted community.

Anything that brings equity gets this label from the Right because inequity is its only goal.

When you really dig beneath the paper thin veneer and ask the proudly anti-woke to tell you precisely what that means, it becomes clear that woke is code language for anyone who gives a damn about other human beings or the planet. It is a dog-whistle slur against expressions of humanity that seek to make a vulnerable community less vulnerable, or to spread resources, opportunity, power, and a voice to more people.

Republicans traffic in words like “woke” because those words require no quantifiable data, no measure objective reality, no definable parameters for their base. They are simply magical incantations that conjure up terror in the minds of a generation of uninformed people who have lost the ability to think critically and who desperately need someone to ratify their prejudices and give credence to their blind hatred of difference.

Watching Conservative America’s histrionics about the Woke Mob’s swiftly-advancing  threat, I am greatly encouraged because I see how terrified they are. It tells me that they sense the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, they see the progress on the horizon of history, they feel the demographics here moving toward a place where they will soon be the minority.

And woke will win because woke is simply the empathy that makes human beings human.

Yes, the Woke Mob is coming for them: the disparate, sprawling army of human beings who know that diversity makes us better, that compassion is the better path, that more voices make a sweeter sound, that everyone should gave the chance to have joy in this life.

And the bigots and the hate-preachers and the supremacists are right to be afraid of us because we in our “wokeness” are going to make sure that they do not have the final word here.

Kindness is woke.
Compassion is woke.
Generosity is woke,
Love is woke.

At the heart of it all, to those who traffic in this latest war cry, to be woke is to be deeply human.

And that humanity will be the foe they cannot defeat and are right to fear.

Woke will win.

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