I Must Be Woke

I've written before about Singing Wheels--the iconic textbook from my fourth-grade years. It's a kind of Eric Sloane for kids-- a reader-friendly look at life on the frontier in the early 19th century, as a town comes into being with a blacksmith, a sawmill, and a gristmill, adding in time a teacher and a cobbler. 

There are lots of line drawing cataloguing the clothes and implements of daily life, as well as color illustrations showing the myriad activities of the settlers--travel by stagecoach, spinning, hog butchering, bridge building, on and on.

I thought it might be good to try it on Josie--she has the reading vocabulary to deal with it--though she may be daunted by the density of the text,

So I began to reread it and almost right away, my woke sensibilities hit (see above) a silly woman having trouble telling her left from her right. Hmm. Okay, I'll let that slide, particularly as the other women in the story are admirable, but I don't like it.

Then Tom asked his father if there were any Indians around and was told "the government bought their lands and moved them west. . ."

Oh, how much double-dealing and misery is dismissed in the sentence. While I'm not sure of the best way to explain to a child the Trail of Tears and the terrible treatment of the Native Americans, I couldn't just leave it at this.

And then there's the chapter where wolves are killing the livestock and the men and boys surround them and kill them all. Yikes!

I know, I know, back then it was a matter of survival for the settlers. Today it's about the survival of an endangered species.  Weird how that works.

Still, I think I'll hold off on offering Singing Wheels to Josie just yet.

WOKE--What's in a Word?

Much as Communist or Socialist has been a handy scare-word since the Fifties for the Right to hang on anyone with progressive social views, now woke is the term of opprobrium that really gets their knickers in a twist, especially the knickers of Florida's governor.

Woke's a word politicians struggle to define--tricky because it can sound like moral theology.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, woke means 'alert to and concerned about social injustice and discrimination.'

What's so bad about that? Isn't it what most religions teach?

(Here's the thing that may have damned the term for the Right. Woke began as a term in Black slang and gained more widespread use as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. And we know what the Right feels about BLM.)

Through his spokespersons, we learn that Gov. Desantis defines woke as the belief that there are systemic injustices in America and that these injustices should be addressed. 

Fair enough. That's a good definition. And why wouldn't one want to acknowledge and work to correct these injustices?

Ron gets round this sticky dilemma of choosing not to address these injustices by simply declaring that there are none. Nope, we're all equal with equal opportunity, equal advantages, equal treatment. 

Magical thinking at its finest.