Was walking downtown yesterday when I saw a well-dressed man throw a cigarette into a trash bin. This was on 19th Street, just off Broadway. Curious, I peeked into the trash bin. It was filled with crumpled newspapers and cardboard. The cigarette was still ignited. I called out to the man, “Hey! You could start a fire!”
“I really don’t care,” he replied, and moved on.
What kind of person would do that? It had to have been deliberate. Most smokers simply toss their butts into the street. This guy walked over to the trash bin and flicked the cigarette inside, with a nonchalance was like a huge middle finger to society at large. I thought about it the rest of my way home and came to the conclusion that, in a general sense, it is the progressive, or woke, philosophy that made the man behave so irresponsibly.
What is the essence of woke? It’s that everybody is equal (their emphasis on so-called “equity”). Nobody is better than anyone else. All behaviors are equal: thus, you can’t tell me what to do or what not to do, because who the hell are you to boss me around? If I feel like doing something, it’s my right. I am somebody. If I feel like throwing a lit cigarette into a trash big, I’m entitled. If you don’t like it, drop dead.
We see this attitude reflected throughout wokedom in Oakland. It’s Pamela Price claiming that certain people have the right to act out through criminality because they’ve been hurt by structural racism. It’s Carroll Fife alleging that she’s entitled to take over somebody else’s house because, well, because she’s Carroll Fife and she feels like it. It’s Nikki Bas saying it’s okay to defund the police because the police, after all, are simply a bunch of racist thugs trying to keep poor people down. It’s Cat Brooks lying that arresting “Black, Brown and poor people” for criminal activity is “state-sanctioned murder and violence.” In short, this woke attitude excuses any sociopathic behavior, as long as it’s perpetrated by people of color, who are entitled to commit crimes because they’ve suffered from racism for far too long.
We used to have something called “mores”—customs, norms and behaviors that are acceptable to a society or social group. These mores [pronounced MORE-ays] were developed over the course of civilization’s long march from the law of the jungle to the orderly societies of modernism. Society has always known how to deal with transgressors, which it correctly regarded as threats. But with the rise of progressive wokeism, these customs and standards have been thrown away. In their ferocious pursuit of “equity,” woke progressives have decided to declare war on the threads of decency that have held us together throughout history. The woke progressives don’t care if their philosophy is rending our society apart. In fact, they want to tear society down, so that they can rebuild it according to their woke plan. If people have to suffer and perish as a result, so be it. As Stalin shrugged, concerning the liquidation of ten million landlords who opposed the imposition of Soviet Communism, “What is a generation?” If an entire generation had to die in order for Stalin to impose his views on Russia, well, the end justifies the means.
So we see in Oakland the gentleman throwing his lit cigarette into the trash bin. He may never have heard of Pamela Price or Carroll Fife or Cat Brooks. But he has inhaled their noxious message through the media, through his neighbors, through the air he breathes daily. And that message is “Do whatever you want.” If that leads to a conflagration downtown, it doesn’t matter: it only accelerates the revolution of destruction that the woke progressives are waging.