Two recent incidents that both garnered worldwide coverage have made me rethink my conclusions about wokeism.
The first was this national brouhaha about the three college presidents, which I’m sure you’re heard of. The second concerns Farley’s East, the café on Grand Avenue I’ve frequented for a good many years. The three college presidents all downplayed the seriousness of anti-Israel sentiment on their campuses; one has already lost her job, and the other two appear likely to. At Farley’s, employees blocked attempts by a Jewish patron to photograph antisemitic graffiti; those same employees made antisemitic utterances to her.
All this got me thinking about how deeply wokeism has penetrated into America’s institutions—even top universities and coffee shops! The three college presidents were “woke” in the sense that they could not summon the moral courage to condemn anti-semitism because they felt sorry for Palestinians, who—as people of color—must have our sympathy because they’ve been so mistreated by White Israelis. The Farley’s employees (who now have been fired) were similarly woke in that they turned their hostility, not to the violent graffiti that calls for pushing the State of Israel into the sea, but toward a Jewish woman who simply wanted to take pictures of the graffiti so she could report it to the authorities. In both cases, we see the ugly side of wokeism.
I’m now starting to think of wokeism, not as an aberrant political ideology, (which it is) but as a disease. Let me explain.
A very dear family member of mine is suffering from incurable, metastatic or Stage 4 cancer. There’s nothing to be done about it except chemotherapy, which has annoying side effects but may be able to hold the cancer in abeyance so that he can live a fairly normal life for a few more years.
There’s an analogy to be made between cancer and wokeism. In my view, the progressivism of Oakland government is a disease that, if left untreated, will sooner or later kill the infected organism—Oakland itself. I call the disease wokeism: it is the cancer of governments and institutions. Like cancer itself, wokeism arises in a single organ and then metastasizes or spreads to other organs. In Oakland’s case, it’s hard to say exactly where wokeism began—the Mayor? The City Council? Board of Education? City Administrator’s office? Civil Rights Compliance? Human Resources Management? Race and Equity Department? It’s now rampaging through the entire body politic.
What is the chemotherapy with which we’re treating this cancer? I like to think it’s the Coalition for a Better Oakland. As with the case of my cousin, we administer treatment on a regular basis. In his case, it’s chemo every two weeks. In our case, it’s intellectual clarity, administered every day, through this blog, and through our presence on Facebook and to some extent on nextdoor.com. We inject cancer-killing concepts that, we hope and pray, will stop the spread of wokeism. We don’t claim to be able to 100% cure Oakland, at least in the foreseeable future. But what we can do is curtail the metastasis and, in so doing, buy some precious time, until an actual cure is invented or developed, by helping voters to see the pernicious effects of wokeism and then ceasing to vote for the “progressive” candidates who spread it.
I said earlier that my family member is experiencing some pretty unpleasant side effects from his chemotherapy. Similarly, there are side effects to what we do at the Coalition. One of the most common is that people claim we’re some kind of racist rightwing group. Because we criticize people of color—Carroll Fife, Cat Brooks, Pamela Price—their defenders are able to hurl this false allegation at us, and some simple-minded people actually believe it. That’s nonsense, of course. It’s like saying that the physicians who treat my family member with chemotherapy are prejudiced against cancer. Morons who argue thus would say, “Cancer has every right to exist. Anyone who is trying to exterminate cancer is a racist, or a cancerist; they hate cancer because it’s different from them.”
Well, yes, we do hate cancer, and are doing our best to eradicate it. It’s exactly the same with wokeism. We hate it because it’s anti-life and contrary to common sense. It goes against the grain of everything we know. It destroys, instead of creating. It causes suffering. It denies natural laws. It divides us instead of bringing us together. Wokeism, like other ism’s that preceded it (Communism, fascism, feudalism) has proven utterly unable to bring peace to a complex, multi-layered society like ours. Wokeism must be crushed.
Steve Heimoff