Doggedly using Helvetica instead of default or more popular MS and other fonts these years, I do not claim to be smart, a wise or especially intelligent person. On things that interest me I do have my views, and my slants that come out in what I say and write, preach and teach. I'm just a man, a person, another of billions of us humans, ants, chimpanzees whose nature is war, to fight. Purposefully to provoke where there's peace (yes, I'm aware that I do that).
Everybody, I'm one of them, hopes (and I think may actually even unconsciously believe) that during her/his lifetime the world will settle down to abiding peaceably; but here I am ten days from eighty-six times around the sun, and there's no prospect of world peace on any horizon, nor has there ever been in human history. Ants we are, fighting the next anthill to the death. Humans: "this experiment sucks", as they say. Totally irrationally, our dog Happy used to wander down the alley to the house where another dog lived, Vick, and pick a fight to what would have been the death if either we or Vick's owners didn't go to the scene and put a stop to it. Happy: just another Being, got to fight.
While we had one dog, Happy, all those growing up years, our next-door neighbor Bill Guy had at least half a dozen dogs, and sooner rather than later they would tire of the dog, and there'd be a vacant space, then another dog appears. One I remember was a doberman-pinscher whose total dedication in life was killing cats, the dog would chase down, catch, and shake to death every cat it could, the animal screaming in fear and pain, to our horror and outrage, and deaf to Bill's shouting at the dog to stop. Why are we creatures driven to fight, kill, war, why?
וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם׃
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. Gen 1:27
Earthlings all: remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
It's our creaturely nature to war, to fight, we cannot help it, I do not know why except to wonder that it's part of our godly image (which theologically robs us of freewill and therefore diminishes our responsibility and culpability for the evil we do, and that is done in our name). The wars of the gods brought down to earth? If you don't think so, it's obvious that you've not read the Book of Joshua among others.
At any event, words and terms, as I was saying, I confess to not being especially smart (though neither are you), but I try to work things out to my understanding.
"cultural appropriation" for example, I finally worked it out: it's a term used by morons who don't want there to be a sushi section in the university cafeteria.
"woke", I'm aware of it and have been trying to work it out without actually using it because (read this):
One Urban Dictionary contributor defines 'woke' as “being aware of the truth behind things 'the man' doesn't want you to know”. Meanwhile, a concurrent definition signals a shift in meaning to “the act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue”.
So below (scroll down) I've copy-and-pasted yet another essay, this one from Fox News online, that helps me get it, though I have no intention of saying it, that would be cultural appropriation.
"cancel culture" is another, a bit more oblique than some of the trendy terms, sort of like getting a joke or solving a riddle. If you criticize my candidate I won't buy your sponsor's brand of toothpaste.
"Black Lives Matter" (spell-correct capitalized it) is another. Starting as a protest response to racism in America, protest against the invisible racism that is embedded in our culture (which now goes as Critical Race Theory) and especially against the racism that produces violence against Blacks by authority figures. I'm for BLM, but that does not mean I support "BLM, Inc."
"critical race theory" I had to work out what it means, and it's valid. Born and bred in the Deep Old South, including immediately post-civil-war parents, grandparents, culture, attitudes and era, I've been aware of CRT's validity all my life, though without the title.
Why, why am I doing this? Why spend Time with these thoughts and writing some of them down, including somewhat confrontationally? IDK. It isn't principled, conscience, it's just that because of something about my Being; looking around horrified at what I see, perceive, realize, comprehend, discern, understand; and who I became during my college years, from what I obliviously was before, I've got to get some of it out, come what may.
Who understands me? I think only one old Navy friend, who understands with me, that some things inside you won't let you have peace within yourself until you have somebody that you can trust, share and confide in. As for everyone else, it doesn't matter.
pax et amor
TW+
What does ‘woke’ mean?
The word was first printed in a 1962 New York Times essay by the author William Melvin Kelley
What is woke?
Aside from being the past participle of wake, for decades, it meant conscious and aware – but the slang word has come to represent an embrace of progressive activism, as well.
Merriam-Webster added the word to its dictionary in 2017, defining it as, "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)." The Oxford dictionary adopted it the same year, defining it as "originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice.”
"Woke is a slang term that is easing into the mainstream from some varieties of a dialect called African American Vernacular English (sometimes called AAVE)," according to Merriam-Webster. "In AAVE, awake is often rendered as woke, as in, ‘I was sleeping, but now I’m woke.’”
The meaning appears to have shifted sometime after Erykah Badu repeatedly used the line "I stay woke" in her 2008 song, "Master Teacher," which begins, "I am known to stay awake."
Rapper Meek Mill performs "Stay Woke" onstage at the 2018 BET Awards at Microsoft Theater on June 24, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for BET)
After the song came out, "’Stay woke’ became a watch word in parts of the Black community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better," according to Merriam-Webster.
Then in 2013 and 2014, after Florida man George Zimmerman was acquitted in Trayvon Martin’s slaying and the police-involved death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a wave of Black Lives Matter activism emerged around the country. The phrase went from Twitter hashtag to rallying cry.
"The word woke became entwined with the Black Lives Matter movement; instead of just being a word that signaled awareness of injustice or racial tension, it became a word of action," according to Merriam-Webster. "Activists were woke and called on others to stay woke."
In 2018, the rapper Meek Mill took the phrase as the top single on his album "Legends of the Summer."
The BLM-themed "Stay Woke" was his first song since getting out of prison in April of that year.
"How can I pledge allegiance to the flag," he raps in the final verse. "When they killin' all our sons, all our dads?"
But the meaning of woke evolved again with the rise of "cancel culture" -- as the two terms saw increased use, they became intertwined in the public consciousness. Often, someone gets canceled after they say something insensitive – something not woke.
So an addition to meaning aware and progressive, many people now interpret woke to be a way to describe people who would rather silence their critics than listen to them.
That’s entirely different than what the word meant when it first appeared in print.
That was in a 1962 New York Times article about beatniks and pop culture absorbing jazz music and African American slang from Harlem, Oxford revealed in a June 2017 article about new words heading into the dictionary.
That article, written by the Black New York City novelist William Melvin Kelley was titled, "If you’re woke, you dig it" – meaning if you’re in the know, you understand.
As he noted at the time, a lot of jazz-era idioms became mainstream speech, and words like cool and hip. But the slang was already evolving in meaning back then.
"At one time, the connotations of ‘jive’ were all good," Kelley wrote. "Now they are bad, or at least questionable.”
A decade later, in Barry Beckham’s "Garvey Lives!" play about the Black Nationalist leader and publisher Marcus Garvey, a character named Strong vows that he "won’t go to sleep" but instead will "stay woke.”
"I been sleeping all my life," he says. "And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke. And I’m gon help him wake up other Black folk.”
Now it’s not so much a racial term as an ideological one.
