If America is to succeed in responding to these 21st Century challenges, our political system cannot continue to bog down in the mire of partisan gamesmanship.
Chuck Hagel – 24th Secretary of Defense
I’m not sure how it happened, but each day I get an email from a site that hosts a quiz. The quiz subjects are wide-ranging, from history to technology to cultural stuff. Today’s quiz related to slang words. Being the hip kind of modern guy I am, I was disappointed in how many of the terms I missed. It made me think about Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee’s Republican response to the State of the Union Address. Governor Huckabee alleged that “the Biden administration is more interested in woke fantasies than in the hard reality that Americans face every day.” Given the tone and content of the rest of her remarks I was pretty sure that accusing someone of being interested in woke fantasies was not intended as a compliment. I SORT OF have a grasp of what people are talking about when they say they are or are not “woke” but what is the background to this whole subject? The concept of a “woke culture” sure gets batted around a lot by politicians. Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
The Merriam Webster dictionary says that to be woke is to be “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” Hmm, not sure why THAT should be controversial. Some groups take pride in being woke while others see it as a pejorative. The Merriam Webster website goes on to say that the word gained widespread usage beginning in 2014 as a part of the Black Lives Matter movement. The turbulence starts to make a little more sense now. Discussion on being “woke” often moves into another phrase which is a hot button these days – “Cancel Culture”. This refers to the practice of withdrawing support or endorsement of a person or a concept. Celebrities can be “cancelled” if they have been found to have committed something that is grossly unfair, bigoted, racist, sexist or otherwise running afoul of generally accepted behavior.
People who criticize the “woke-culture” and the “cancel culture” say that it tends to make us intolerant of others and other’s ideas. They say that “woke” people cancel them without really understanding them or giving them a chance to explain their position. This can result in a situation where one group is trying to make room for their viewpoints with another fearing it will compromise its principles by engaging with a viewpoint they see as totally invalid. President Obama cautioned young people about this phenomenon.
“I get a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people. If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because ‘Man did you see how woke I was? I called you out!’ That’s enough, if all you’re doing is casting stones, you are probably not going to get that far.”
Given how we primarily interact with each other these days via social media, it is easy to see how this can happen. We don’t have to sit down across the table from someone else, we can just criticize them on-line. This anonymity also sometimes leads to outrageous and hyperbolic accusations. We are not held accountable; we just post what we think and then duck and hide.
There NEEDS to be some process for holding people accountable especially our leaders – political, business, academic and cultural leaders. But as I have said in previous postings, we have to be REASONABLE and FAIR in our criticisms, even if and probably ESPECIALLY if they are being done via social media. Also, we need to cut each other a little slack. We can’t demand perfection from anyone, even if they ARE a leader. And we need to give them some space to explain their actions and to apologize for them if necessary. And if we are the accused, we need to resist the urge to be defensive and to lash out at our critics. Both sides need to recognize the situation for what it is and move on.
My cynicism regarding these concepts and the present state of our political climate makes me a bit rueful. Actually, a lot more than rueful, it makes me disgusted. The far political right rails against the progressives of the political left accusing them of trying to impose a “cancel culture” on us and our children. So, in their efforts to combat that they attempt to impose THEIR values on others, sometimes using the machinery of government, as in legislatively dictating school curricula etc. The far political left seizes on every action by their political opponents, sometimes in absurd ways, trying to please their various constituencies. It all makes me wonder, who is trying to “cancel” who? This is all just the latest variant in our broken political system, the latest set of talking points from each side. Each side wants to paint the other as being out of touch with real Americans. THEY are the crazies we are the reasonable, sane ones.
To all of this I say: “CUT THE CRAP!” We have a lot bigger problems than if one celebrity slipped and used an inappropriate pronoun or for that matter if one celebrity got unfairly “cancelled”. Republicans don’t REALLY want to end Social Security and Medicare. For better or worse this would be political suicide. And President Biden wasn’t REALLY weakly ignoring the Chinese spy balloon – it was downed as soon as it was safe to do so and in the meantime the military limited its ability to complete any espionage. National security was not breached.
• Most unbiased sources contend that Social Security and Medicare are heading for insolvency. What are we going to do about it? Don’t pretend that we can just stay the course and that this problem will fix itself or that we can just continue to borrow more money forever as the Democrats seem to plan. And don’t pretend that we can keep these programs in their present state, while maintaining our national defense expenditures without raising taxes (or borrowing more money) as the Republicans pretend that we can do. These three budget areas comprise such a huge percentage of the total budget that we could cut every other program to ZERO and still not reach our goals.
• China is our biggest economic rival and our biggest potential economic partner. What IS the correct policy for dealing with them? How can we induce them to better social and human rights positions without coming to economic or military confrontations with them? What SPECIFIC policies should we employ? Don’t give me some generalized political crap that if we had our former President who was a greater leader none of this would be a problem. And again, don’t pretend that we can just keep coasting along as we have been and reach our desired outcomes. And by the way, WHAT ARE THOSE OUTCOMES?
Come up with some specific solutions to the issues instead of spending all of your time trying to “cancel” your political opponents. I don’t care if you are Democrats, Republicans, Whigs, Tories, Labor or Socialists. Do you have viable ideas for how to address our problems? Why don’t the parties foster some honest communication to the American public? I think we can handle it. The problem is that THEY DON’T think we can. They think their best shot is to divert us into conversations about whether or not we are “woke” enough or “too woke”, and who is trying to cancel who.
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Words from a radical moderate.