What is Woke?

Recently, some smart-alec of my acquaintance asked me if I was "woke". My response was that it was not a word that I normally use.  Woke is a feeble attempt to compress many different things into a single word: empathy, compassion, enlightenment, an aversion to racial prejudice, and so on.. "If the question is: am I an enlightened man? then the answer is yes, I believe that I am", I told him.

Woke is really a bumper sticker word, the kind that I usually try to avoid at all costs. In fact, this is the first time I have ever used it in this context on this site since it first came into vogue a couple of years ago,

Now the right wing SCREAM MACHINE are attempting to turn woke into an extreme menace that is a tangible threat to the peace and security of the free world; much in the same way their political forebears did with the so-called communist menace seventy years ago. Governor Ron DeSantis (and 2024 presidential hopeful) recently said of his overrated state: 

"Florida is where Woke goes to die".

And I believed he meant every word he said. If the American people are stupid enough to send DeSantis to the White House on January 20, 2025, empathy compassion and enlightenment will have no place in or part of his administration's worldview. Racial bigotry will be mainstream in the DeSantis White House in a way it hasn't been since Woodrow Wilson lived there over one-hundred years ago. The difference between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump is quite simple: Trump is a moron. DeSantis is not. The man is a real and existential threat to American Democracy in a way that The Donald - on his worst day - never was. Ron DeSantis is a radical extremist of the first - and worst - order.

The most shocking thing about DeSantis is his youth. In researching his history I was stunned (and quite depressed) to learn that he was born in September of 1978 - one month after my twentieth birthday. Can you believe that? I tend to equate such a demented and reactionary thinking to bitter old white men. How DeSantis got to this point in his thinking in a mere forty-four years is perplexing - to say the least. A woman who went on a date with him when they were in their twenties, says that while dining out she corrected him on his pronunciation of the term "Thai food". He mispronounced it as "thigh food". She says he got up from his seat, walked out of the restaurant and left her paying the bill. She says she never saw him again. What does that tell you about the man's character?

Even though (in my humble opinion anyway) "woke" is an incredibly silly and simplistic term for a very broad and complicated movement, it's a good thing that more and more Americans in recent times are describing themselves as such. "The New Enlightenment" would be a nicer way of putting it. "Woke" sounds to me like it was cooked up in the bathroom of some grammar school. 

So let's all pledge ourselves to this New Enlightenment - or whatever the heck you want to call it. This is definitely a direction that America needs to go.  

Happy Spring, everybody!

Tom Degan

Goshen, NY