By Judie Brown
We hear that word a great deal these days, and it is no longer merely the past tense of wake. Today it is, according to Webster, a slang word meaning “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”
I first heard that word uttered by Cathy Areu, editor of the Hispanic magazine Catalina. She was featured in a 2018 FOX News interview with Tucker Carlson during which she was identified as “The Liberal Sherpa.” While Areu is solidly in the woke crowd, it is interesting that the word itself has come to mean anything the speaker wants it to mean.
But over time that word has been incorporated into situations and attitudes that have absolutely nothing to do with common sense and actual human concerns. So I turned to Victor Davis Hanson, who explains wokeness brilliantly. He writes, “Almost everything that has followed from the woke mass hysteria gripping the nation since 2020 has proved disastrous. Wokeism destroys meritocracy in favor of forced equality of result—history’s prescription for civilizational decline.”
When discussing the preborn child, for example, it is woke to deny that she is a human being, let alone a person. Once the woke-educated individual accepts that fallacy, then the killing of the innocent individual becomes a non sequitur since the baby is equated with a tumor or other such growth. Wokeism—the practice of being woke—is just another way of saying that one is completely in agreement with secular humanism, the denial that God exists.
In that freefall of ignorance regarding fundamental facts, the sciences of human embryology and fetology—which are devoted to the study of the preborn—become meaningless.
Actually, those who espouse these attitudes, the same people who comprise the culture of death, belong to a segment of our human community that has made it woke to support anti-life attitudes and behaviors. They define those of us who prefer the laws of God to wokeism as incapable of enlightenment.
Enter Romy Dolgin, an editorial editor for The Harvard Crimson, who apparently disagrees with such nonsense, writing,
I don’t want to be woke. I don’t want to restrict my definition of activism and intelligence to only include those who agree with me politically. I want to be open-minded and engaged. I want to be informed and passionate. I want to be an advocate and a human being beyond political issues. Maybe we can broaden the definition of “woke” to include these characteristics from both sides of the political spectrum, but until then I remain contently un-woke.
Though Dolgin doesn’t suggest this, I will add that the disciples of Christ were and are unwoke. Those of us who are willing to tell the truth about life and all that is required of a faithful disciple of Truth, Our Lord Jesus Christ, are happily unwoke.
For as Archbishop Charles Chaput has written, “A culture that has a command of reason and the byproducts of reason—science and technology—but lacks faith has made a Faustian bargain with the (very real) devil that can only lead to despair and self-destruction. Such a culture has gained the world with its wealth, power and material success. But it has forfeited its soul.”
Oh, to be ever unwoke!