I WOKE up to the immorality of the MAGAs and their sociopath leaders.
Woke is the past tense of wake. The Merriam-Webster definition is “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues”.
The first 35 years of my life was spent near the coast of Mississippi. I was fortunate to have been raised in a Christian religion that expects and lets you make up your own mind. I am an Eagle Scout. I was a Boy Scout leader in the 1970s. The philosophies of loving your neighbor as you love yourself and do to others as you would have done to you. I still think that the Scout Oath: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.” is a good standard to use to measure my actions.
This was not easy to do in the society of south Mississippi in the 1960s. I was and have been disquieted because of the conflict between my moral and ethical guideposts and what I saw all around me day in day out. I tried not to add to the social assault on my “neighbors” that I saw all around me. The simplistic meme of “white is good an black is bad” was the moral and ethical salve used to keep 99% of the population from waking up (being woken) to the ongoing landslides of injustices that fueled and supported the societal tensions between the “Whites” and everyone else. In an authoritarian society, it is critical that the peons be kept at each other’s throats and not woke to the systematic injustices universally applied to all those in the “lower class”. This includes whites, blacks, browns, yellows and anyone without sufficient resources to be in the ruling class.
I tried to walk a path of helping the least of these and avoiding adding to the societal problems. The ultimate solution to stop assisting the problems, not continuing to be a direct and indirect enabler was to move. The saying foes “there are lot of good people from Mississippi”.
In 1984 I moved to Indianapolis Indiana, and it seemed to me that I had moved into a liberal enclave. It turns out that circumstances are relative. At that time Indiana was focused on business and financial success and except for the southwestern part of the state, was not consumed with keeping “those people” in their places.
I have lived in a mixed-race suburb of Atlanta for the last 27 years. Once again, I tried to not make thing worse and help where I can. In 2021 I made a pilgrimage to Montgomery Alabama to visit several sites with monuments to the struggle for civil rights for blacks in the south. Two sites had a profound impact on me: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum. Both memorials were and continue to be funded by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) which is made up of private donners and uses no public monies.
The Memorial for Peace and Justice contains rectangular steel boxes suspended from the ceiling. Each box has the names, places and dates of lynchings have been incised, one box per county in the U.S.A.
I was emotionally struck when, at the entrance to the memorial, I saw that a former salve who had my surname, was lynched in an Alabama county in the nineteen tens. I continued to look for the counties I am familiar with to see how many and when lynchings occurred in those places. The EJI has duplicate boxes laid out by state just outside the hanging building. Any county, that agrees to appropriately display one of these memorials can do so without charge. The last time I was there in 2022, there were no missing slabs in the inventory of memorials.
My next awakening was the visit to the other half of the EJI memorials, the Legacy Museum. The displays in this museum show the migration of the use of slaves from colonial times to emancipation. It graphically and in abundant describes the systematic racial injustices inflicted by the white supremacist regimes across the southern U.S. from after the insurrection to almost the present. I left the exhibit wondering how I could have been so blind to the acts of inhumanity going on around me. I also became woke to the realization that this cancer of injustice was raging right now, today.
The evolutionary successors of the Tea Party and the MAGA followers of Donald Trump, are fighting as hard as they can, backed by near infinite monetary support, to put the genie back in the bottle. They are fighting against the tide of population growth and biology. Their hope is to re-establish the U.S. version of apartheid as practiced in South Africa, that was shattered when the U.S. elected a black man as President. By erasing and suppressing our history they hope to stop the inevitable awakening that will happen as our population becomes woke.
What being woke means to me, is that I am aware of the significant baggage that I have as a southern male. The chains, like Marley’s in the Christmas Carol which represents his “sins in life and his guilt in failing to help his fellow Man” are both societal and personal. Like Scrooge, we must change our relationships. We must wake up to our failings and commit to implementing different outcomes if not solutions.
We must become woke to the instances were we are not loving our neighbor or treating he or she as we want to be treated.
Woke, in this instance is not a bad thing but a necessity if our society, a democratic republic, is to survive.
Equal Justice Initiative: https://eji.org/
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice: https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial
The Legacy Museum: https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum