Your Anti-Woke Panic Is So Unnecessary

The Woke mob is coming for you!

They will cancel you. They will freak out if you compliment a woman. They will get you fired from work. They will force your children to be groomed in class. They will make the kids read porn and unflattering history. They want to let your child identify as a girl. Or a boy. Or a cat.

They want your children to hate America, and the whole Western civilization, and the world. And you!

It’s gotten so silly.

Has the world moved forward with more inclusion of formerly marginalized people? Yes. But somehow all that movement below, allowing votes, marriage, employment rights, and certain civil rights has not stirred things up so much that the sky is falling.

No.

Then why the fuss?

The sky is not falling because consciousness is raised.

The sky is falling because we have put so much pollution, fire ash particulates, flood debris, tornado intensity, and microplastics into it that we are in danger. We have displaced the natural habitats of so many birds and beasts, that many of them struggle to survive. We have largely ignored that the poorest people on Earth are the least responsible for our trash and emissions.

This ensures that, interestingly, people of color, women, and girls, especially, are the most impacted negatively by our exploitative ways of life. Others who are disproportionately hurt by such attitudes are LGBTQ+ people, non-denominational people, and more than anyone else, the most impoverished people everywhere.

These, by no coincidence, might be the same human beings that get labeled as “woke”. Why is that?

Could it be that living in denial of injustice could be like a bad dream?

Not impacted much at all are the very people so very worried about woke mobs and identity politics destroying the formerly comfortable world they lived in.

It is true that the once habitable world where less than seven billion people lived was sustained for a while. Yet it cannot be assured to stay that way if we separate into angry camps that blame “the woke”, or the “non-woke’” for all our troubles.

We have come to a moral fork in the road

If we continue to fear that others are coming to take what is “rightfully” ours, then we will do the very wrong thing.

Fearmongering can lead the way to fascism.

It has happened often in history, and there is often one leap forward and two goosesteps back. Back and forth.

It is fundamentally different this time. It may be because Earth has reached carrying capacity and we must optimize sharing and resources. It may be because — as some fear — many more wired people are “Woke” to our new uneven systems.

We find one another through new technology, online life, media, and marketing. These very things could also bring us down with the dirty sky. If we were to become a true mob we would burn books, and then people. Adding to the pyre.

But we do not have to panic about tribalism unless we give ourselves over to it. Know that the special interests that fuel your outrage do not care about whether you are woke, or asleep.

They care about what you buy.

Or, who you vote for, that is, who they must buy.

We have reached a moral fork in the road, and although it is not a starkly obvious good versus evil choice, (almost nothing is binary in humans) it is a choice of which direction you wander toward: inclusion, and Earth belonging? Or exclusion, expulsion, and extinction?

Always look for those things we share in common, in every way that we can. That is how we can exchange the courage, knowledge, creativity, and inspiration we know to make the most out of strength and diversity.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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