I awoke today with thoughts about Wokeism.
Before going to bed Sunday night, I found myself staying up too late watching yet again the movie “The Longest Day,” a cinematic chronicling of the D-Day invasion of Normandy that marked the beginning of the Allies’ march to Berlin and victory in World War II.
It occurred to me it is just possible, probably very likely, that we no longer have enough tough-minded individuals willing to storm a beach with the high likelihood of death trying to win freedom for others.
This becomes notable if all the saber-rattlers in the Clueless Joe regime succeed in getting us into a direct shooting war with Russia, China, or a combination of those two nations.
Oh, we have plenty of people who purport to be fighting the good fight for ideals. But those ideals now are socialism, racial politics and transgenderism.
These people love to protest and destroy property when there is little threat of pushback from authorities. I wonder how many would be willing to scale cliffs under withering machine gun fire, as happened on D-Day?
Some are suggesting – hoping? – we have hit peak Wokeism. But such thoughts have been about for years, with no overwhelming evidence to support the premise.
First, a definition. Woke apologists define the term as something honorable and benign, a sensitivity to systemic injustices and prejudices.
The problem is the Wokesters have just one tool in their box and it reminds one of the aphorism, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
Wokesters see injustice everywhere, whether it exists or not.
Critics paint Woke types as being so self-aware and socially-aware that they are blinded to the big picture. These navel-gazers have limited perspective, if any.
Problems crop up when Woke meets reality.
Example: Silicon Valley Bank has collapsed for many reasons, prompting a nervous weekend of putting together bailouts for the bank’s uninsured depositors.
Those poking through ashes of the Silicon Valley Bank failure have noted the bank operated WITHOUT a chief risk officer for parts of 10 months in 2022, presumably when having someone on the job would have been helpful.
Meanwhile, a risk management executive still on the job, a self-described “queer person of color” was distracted by dabbling in “LGBTQ+” causes on company time.
And the bank, even as it had no one in charge of risk management, boasted of having a diversity, equity and inclusion director on staff.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, DEI, is a cornerstone of Wokeism. All these goals are desirable, except when taken to extremes, as in the Woke playbook.
Predictably, Silicon Valley Bank donated a lot of money to climate activists, another Woke cause that exists without need for justification.
Somehow, none of these hyper-aware, all-knowing Woke types at Silicon Valley Bank saw the bank was in danger of failing due to out-of-control risk.
Anti-Woke optimists view the large numbers of layoffs in the tech industry, a Woke incubator and funder, as encouraging. They see the failure of Silicon Valley Bank as another positive in that regard.
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, turning that from a left-wing echo chamber into an area of open exchange of ideas, also is viewed positively.
But the battle against Wokeism is far from won and likely will not be for a long time, if ever. This is our social equivalent of World War II, a battle to decide if traditional values can prevail, or whether the world will fall even further into this Woke nightmare.
Sam Ross Jr's site 