Remember that time long ago when you were woke?
You were probably much younger then, after all, this was months ago, but some of us still remember those days.
Being woke was fashionable, of course, and like everything fashionable it was doomed to become unfashionable in short order, but if you can, hark back just a little to remember some of the defining moments or at least some of the principal characters.
There was Al Franken. Remember how fast we booted his butt from the Senate for handling a few too many official butts in his unofficial capacity? Being woke cost us one of our own, but the initial "witch hunt" turns out to have been right; we were woke.
And remember the fate of Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor and a host of other ostensibly decent men who treated women…and sometimes men…with arrogance and disdain? Adios.
And then the 1619 Project “woke” us to the knowledge that racism might be a little more difficult to declare as over and done with, since we’d been practicing it so efficiently for 400 years,
All this wokeness scared the bejesus out of the Republicans, who were fine with the status quo on their way to moving backward. And since it was difficult to contradict many of the valid points the liberals kept promoting, the GOP used another tack: they made the word itself an object of derision…and we helped them out by concurring. We poked fun at ourselves for being woke, and the more we did so, the less the Republicans had to attack. They had turned our word against us, and we had been collaborators.
The general reaction to the Depp/Heard trial may have buried the final vestiges of wokedom, again with our blessing. But this is the time we need to be more woke than ever, and wave the woke flag when we can and where we can. There will be coming assaults on gay rights, trans rights, contraception, and even cancer treatments. Many Evangelicals already equate the rape of pre-teens as part of God’s plan, so before you say these things will never happen, pay attention.
Revel in your wokeness, if you’re still a-woke. If you are, it proves you’re still alive and possibly mad as hell. When people like Tucker Carlson, Jim Jordan, Mitch McConnell, or Laren Boebert want to have some fun at your expense, why do you care? You never cared what fools said before. Now you do?
Being socially conscious and politically aware makes the Republicans nervous. Let’s keep them that way as long as possible.