In case you're wondering, no, you will never be woke enough. It seems like I write this column about every couple weeks. In fact, I went back and looked and it was just over a month ago that I wrote one detailing the online demolition of some affable white guy who sought to re-up his Woke Card for another year by publicly declaring that he "felt" people using the "n-word" when they said "woke." You can refresh your memory here if you're interested.
But in case you're tempted to believe that I highlight these sorry tales simply because it's low-hanging fruit for a conservative, or the rhetorical equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel for a writer, let me offer what I hope are my purer intentions. This isn't about mockery nearly as much as it's about driving home a very important, counterintuitive point.
The cultural narrative is clear: Christianity, and more specifically conservative Christianity, is a fun-stealing ideology centered around the deprivation of people's rights and ability to pursue happiness. It is dogmatic, rigid, and intolerant. The spirit of the age, meanwhile, is sold as open-minded, accepting, even loving. I repeatedly highlight and document these stories, then, to provide compelling evidence to the contrary of that false narrative.
While I acknowledge that not all Christ followers embrace it, Christianity is at its very core predicated around forgiveness, mercy, redemption, and grace. It is equally accessible to all colors, ages, and classes. And best of all, the goalposts of its ideological framework were anchored in eternal bedrock at Calvary. God's eternal nature assures that they haven't moved and they won't be moving.
You will not get such accommodation and assurance from the world. The latest to learn the hard way? Some individual named Kim Siever whose house received a fresh painting before the dawning of pride month:
Statement made for all the neighborhood to see, no? Unfortunately, it was also seen by the gatekeepers of wokeness over at some outfit called Project DROC. Identifying themselves as a group of "committed Black + racialized educators," they decided Kim needed to better understand his assignment:
Before you ask, no, I had not yet seen the word "folx" either, but at this point, why not?
Meanwhile, writer Bess Kalb had her own progressive outburst, channeling the spit take George Washington and John Adams would experience if they ever saw a semi-automatic weapon in action.
Bess, having flexed her literary muscles with that sophisticated burst of factory-floor profanity, likely sat back and waited for the "likes" to roll in. Instead, Aura Bogado, an investigative reporter at Reveal who is now peddling the idea that Uvalde police shot some of the children at Robb Elementary, let Ms. Kolb know her citation of the Founding Fathers was painfully un-woke.
There is such a better way to live than this never-ending, yet ultimately futile, gerbil wheel striving to attain sufficient wokeness. Yet so many keep spinning themselves silly.
On an episode of his own podcast last fall, comedian Ricky Gervais – the same guy that has been generating a lot of attention for his recently released, allegedly "transphobic" Netflix special – told neuroscientist Sam Harris:
I want to live long enough to see the younger generation not be woke enough for the next generation. It's going to happen. Don't they realize that, it's like, they're next. That's what's funny.
I don't know about all of them, but at least two more – Kim and Bess – realize it now.
