The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
Here is the re-write. I think Ian might have appreciated this re-write. I will never know.
"Woke Up!"
"Woke Up And Make Peace, With Us."
I come awoke
With a gift for Humankind
Some're still asleep
But the gift don't seem to mind
Rise from the oppression
Woke has got your back
Bringing down the bullies
Nurturing your mind....
You look so self-possessed
I won't disturb your rest
It's frightening when you're sleeping
and wide awake is best.
Wake up and make Woke with us,
Woke up and make Peace
Wake up and make Woke today.
I don't want to make you
I'll let the heart take you
And you'll wake up and make WOKE!.
I woke up in the morning,
in a VERY peaceful mood, I know Earth built my home.
and it's very, very good. Air, Rock and Water Sunshine giving light.. I'm woke and awake And I know that WAR is SHITE!
I come awoke
In a thorny morning mood
And have a proper niggle
At the haughty rabid dudes.
Revolt against the bullies
Get them when they lie,
What happens is truth wins,
It's also very goooood.
I'll go and get the info,
And make some tea and toast
You have another sleep, love
It's you that needs woke most
Woke up and make Peace with me
Wake up and make Woke
Woke up and make Peace with me
I don't want to make you
I'll let the fancy take you
And you'll wake up and make Woke!
Woke up and make Peace with me
Woke up and make Peace
Woke up and make Peace with us
Woke up and make Peacee (PC, lol!)
Woke up
Woke up
Woke up
Wake up!
-- That's it.... lolz. ~ Some history on the term Culture Wars, as a context to this rewrite..
In American usage, "culture war" may imply a conflict between those values considered traditionalist or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal. This usage originated in the 1920s when urban and rural American values came into closer conflict.
This followed several decades of immigration to the States by people who earlier European immigrants considered 'alien'. It was also a result of the cultural shifts and modernizing trends of the Roaring '20s, culminating in the presidential campaign of Al Smith in 1928.
In subsequent decades during the 20th century, the term was published occasionally in American newspapers...
A wider, deeper context.
If we are to be honest we have to admit that's not just that there are 'culture wars' - is that we live within a War Culture.
'Culture War' is a term the Authoritarian Wealth Extraction Element(AWEE - they are taking the piss) crafted to push back against Critical Race Theory, Feminism, Equity Economics, Environmentalism, Climate Disruption being revealed and a range of other learnings that confront the AWEE with the harms they are causing to people and place, for profit.
The War Culture is waging wars for profit. Russia vs Ukraine, Israel vs Palestine, USUK vs Iraq, NATO vs Afghanistan, NATO vs Libya, NATO vs Syria, Saudi vs Yemen, propaganda abounds as 'truth is the first casualty in war'...
As ever, look towards those pouring funds into the weapon supply for the Culture Wars.
Why are we fighting?
~
Woke is basically the status of consciously, intentionally not being a bully, of desiring de-escalation of conflict leading towards peaceful resolution, of standing on empathy and evidence over sentiment and belief in matters of Governance.
Seems like a good idea.
We workers, parents, students and communities really, really want decent, honest and transparent healthy governance that nurtures all people and our shared environment as a long term sustainable form of social organisation, a system of governance that avoids avoidable harms as it's basic theme - eliminating pollution, environment degradation, waste and wealth extraction, all driven by exploitation.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
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The word 'woke' is being used by right wing bullies as an insult.
What they don't get is that it is a compliment.
I am woke (ish). I'd rather not be acutely aware of Racism, in the sense that Racism is just so un-necessary, a cruel invention, designed to set workers at each other in order to prevent us from joining hands and confronting the Ruling class owners. I wish it did not exist. I am not glad to be aware of it. However Racism was invented, and until we un-invent it, I think I need to be acutely aware of it, and how it functions within existing hierarchies of power, wealth and violence as an institutionalised weapon in the class war because that class war is causing so much harm. Being asleep to the existence of that war is no longer an option.
Origins of 'woke'.
The earliest known examples of wokeness as a concept revolve around the idea of Black consciousness “waking up” to a new reality or activist framework and dates back to the early 20th century. In 1923, a collection of aphorisms and ideas by the Jamaican philosopher and social activist Marcus Garvey included the summons “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” as a call to globalBlack citizens to become more socially and politically conscious. A few years later, the phrase “stay woke” turned up as part of a spoken afterword in the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly. The song describes the 1931 saga of a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, who were accused of raping two white women.
"Lead Belly says at the end of an archival recording of the song that he’d met with the Scottsboro defendants’ lawyer, who introduced him to the men themselves. “I made this little song about down there,” Lead Belly says. “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
Lead Belly uses “stay woke” in explicit association with Black Americans’ need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America. Lead Belly’s usage has largely stayed the common, consistent one ever since, including during one notable brush with the mainstream in 1962, via the New York Times.
That year, a young Black novelist named William Melvin Kelley wrote a first-person piece for the Times called “If You’re Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.” In the piece, Kelley points out that the origins of the language of then-fashionable beatnik culture — words like “cool” and “dig” — lay not within white America but with Black Americans, predominantly among Black jazz musicians."
Source: Vox - really interesting article, well written and obviously worth the read, gives a way better history of 'woke' than I am presenting here, and brings the recent 2000s story to the forefront.
Turning gold into lead, and failing.
When 'woke' moved from within the African American community into wider use, over the last decade or so, the alt right tried to turn it into an insult, without realising it is a compliment.
The alt right white supremacist misogynists hated that the African Americans had such a cool, clear and simple word that indicated an acute and historically accurate political awareness: that really boiled their piss into steaming clouds of rage. Cool and right.
They are also really, really irritated that they cannot use their own word 'N8gg8R', yet African Americans can and do use it freely, lovingly among themselves. lolz.
It's a really interesting dynamic. You can feel the dirty, gagging yet impotent rage when the bullies try to turn the word 'woke' against people seeking a pathway towards confronting and impeding racist oppression.
For the alt-right and white supremacists, labelling me or you as 'woke' is their attempt at being insulting.
It is a way of dismissing the other person, as a put down and as a way to avoid the evidence. It is always used at the other person.
Being dismissed in the middle of a discussion or interaction can trigger a reaction, hacking the amygdala, shutting down cortex.
The bullies know this.
That usage of the insult is designed to trigger the target into anger, derailing the frontal cortex, the thinking part of our brain.
That is a trap.
Never react with a counter strike.
Just point out the truth. "Why thank you, I am woke! So kind of you to notice!"
What ever it is, what ever the discussion. Just place the evidence.
Don't worry about convincing or persuading. Just place the evidence, calmly.
That way the bully has no traction. That way the bully loses. Watch the steam from his or her ears, notice the reddening of the cheeks, the thin beads of sweat, the squirming incoherent rage. Let it sizzle.
Which is why Piers Morgan walked off set.
He lost, in public, to the truth, calmly told.
Some one asked on twitter : "what is the opposite of 'woke'?"
I wrote the following.
Bully.
Bully is the opposite of woke.
The opposite of woke is not asleep. Being asleep is not the opposite of woke. It's possible to not know something, to be genuinely unaware. If someone is genuinely asleep, one cannot blame them for not hearing or seeing an emerging danger.
Being awake and a bully: that is the opposite of woke.
Racism is bullying.
Misogyny is bullying.
Xenophobia is bullying.
Nationalism is bullying.
Nativism is bullying.
Hating the vulnerable, the poor, the disabled is bullying.
Externalised Costs is bullying.
Profiteering is bullying.
Hierarchies of Power and Violence are bully cultures.
All of these are the opposite of woke.
When an Oligarchy or Plutocracy is occupying democratic legislatures, excluding the people, and in co-ordination with those who mediate existing public discourse by controlling the bulk of public news media - that is bullying.
Online political grooming is bullying.
Free Speech is a responsibility to be honest, truthful.
Free Speech is not a licence to be a bully.
Free Speech is not a right to groom, manipulate or exploit others through use of lies and various logical fallacies targeting vulnerabilities.
The bullies hide behind Free Speech - to do this they deliberately describe it inaccurately.
The origin of Free Speech is that a Government may not block or harass or oppress a citizen from speaking truth. That is what it means. Nothing more than that. There's an element of Religious Freedom associated with it though that is the least part of the meaning. Religious truths vary, are relative to one another and often do not mirror social material reality. That is why Religion is less than useful when deliberating on policy that concerns the shared spaces between us, the commons. The care of the commons demands honesty and evidence above all else.
The meaning of Free speech is that those in Power cannot be allowed to sanction anyone for speaking truth to the community, in public, about the behaviour, actions and outcomes of those in Power. That honesty is critical to any democratic system.
Whistle-blowers are essential to any community's integrity and they must be protected.
Transparency makes any system safer.
Evidence matters.
When the British Prime Minister dismissed Zero Community Transmission strategy as impossible and impractical in spite of the evidence that it is protecting the lives and economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania, that was bullying. He was using the power of his position to make sure that no honest discussion of ZCT would be allowed in Parliament, thus undermining Free Speech.
Free Speech was never meant to suggest anyone can utter whatever lies, falsehoods or misinformation they like as manipulative tools in any public fora, as tools that exploit other people's vulnerabilities in order to secure any economic, ideological, political or religious advantage.
I think that kind of behaviour is criminal in intent. I know it is criminal behaviour.
Exploiting another human beings vulnerability in order to groom and then exploit that person is a criminal action. It is pure evil. In the sense of a lying nasty venal assault on the integrity of the psyche of the other person for personal gain.
I do not subscribe to any concept of Evil as outside of human action - there is no Satan, no Santa Claus, no force of Evil outside of human behaviour and action.
