In Jim Cook's Archive

AWAKENING

My wife and I made it back to Florida for the winter just as the hot summer weather in Florida dissipated. My secretary switched my home delivery of the Wall Street Journal and my wife added the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. I was soon put off by the liberal Sarasota paper and remembered that I had planned to stop reading it after they canceled Mallard Fillmore, a cartoon strip that poked fun at liberals. The editorial page was full of reprinted articles from the New York Times and the Washington Post espousing liberal causes.

An article by one of the papers editors really got my attention. The article was highly critical of the Atlanta Braves and their fans’ arm gestures known as the Tomahawk Chop, claiming it disrespected indigenous people. This is the kind of woke nonsense we hear constantly these days. I sent in the following email: “A 90% rate of alcoholism on the reservation along with every imaginable dysfunction and liberals worry about the chop.”

In the same article, the editor went further astray. He wrote, “Merely raising this question apparently means I’m woke.” Then he revealed that smug superiority infecting liberals with this paragraph explaining the status of woke, “You know, the reflexive accusation that’s made by folks who clearly aren’t awake enough to grasp that when they obsessively and sneeringly throw around terms like ‘woke’ and ‘wokeness’ nowadays, they sound an awful lot like people trying too hard to appear hip by using slang everyone else stopped using a year ago. When are they going to be ‘woke’ enough to figure out that no one says ‘woke’ anymore? Sigh.”

Except that everybody is still using woke and wokeness every day. It’s no wonder the lefties are retreating from it. Woke exposes their impractical policies, fanatical dogma and plain foolishness. You have to wonder if they ever read a history book. In reality, woke has helped to wake us up.

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