Maybe There’s A Place For A Little “Wokeness”

Problem is, it’s presented as an all-or-nothing issue

Look, I was infuriated as far back as 1999, when I moved to San Francisco, and local government spent endless days debating things like outlawing rodeos in the city, even though there hadn’t been a rodeo in like a hundred years, and whether you had to give advance notice to a homeless person before you took their stolen shopping cart away. Instead of doing the jobs I thought they’d been elected to do.

Stuff like that actually made me more conservative.

And it hasn’t really let up any. From getting lambasted for misgendering people or not referring to people by their preferred pronouns. Never on purpose. I want to refer to you the way you want to be referred to. But I’m old. I’m going to slip up occasionally. I don’t mind being corrected. But condemned?

It also strikes me that the same people who don’t want to be improperly labeled are always the most zealous about labeling me.

Or now that I make my permanent residence on the East Coast, having to sit through insufferable 8 or 10 hour long town meetings where almost none of the endless public comment on resolutions has to do with the actual running of the town, and most of the time is taken up by debate on global issues of which a resolution by a tiny town in Massachusetts is going to have zero impact. While those in town joining and working for advocacy groups might.

At the same time, I’m outside the US right now, and just a couple of days ago I was doing an Improv show of which I’ve done many, in which — as a character — I referred to myself as bisexual. Which in the states nobody would have blinked at. Yet suddenly a beer bottle is hurled at me and several drunk audience members jump up to confront me with epithets like “faggot” including one who races up onto the stage to get in my face and then didn’t really know what was going to happen next.

I also recently mentioned during a standup set that I’m a Jew, and now am the butt of many antisemitic jokes. These are meant to be “good natured”, I’m sure. Still…

What all this has made me realize is why even a little bit of “wokeness” (and maybe we shouldn’t call it that even anymore), might be OK. And how much of a daily fight it must be for people who actually are attacked constantly to get up every morning and live within a society without at least a little bit of tolerance of their personal life choices, which is really what we’re talking about. And in many cases, they aren’t choices.

I use the word “tolerance” guardedly, because the word really should be “acceptance” or “inclusiveness”. Or even “not giving a sh*t” would be OK. But when we’re talking about various “anti-woke” movements we’re very definitely talking about intolerance. Hence, the opposite.

Look, I’m always going to stand my ground. The guy this weekend backed down after some on the brink back-and-forth. But I did realize without a little bit of “that’s not OK behavior” in the back of peoples’ brains, it may be very difficult for many people — just ordinary people — to go about their day.

And I also don’t totally buy the argument from comedians about how they’re just telling jokes — or one politician in particular — about how he’s just being “sarcastic”.

Yeah, if a joke is funny, it’s good. Period. No matter who it skewers. So the really good comedians griping about how some material of theirs is now off limits because of “wokeness” but shouldn’t be, have a very valid point.

But those comedians probably don’t spend much time at open mics anymore. And there’s definitely a trend out there: standups who aren’t funny hiding behind racism, homophobia, and whatever else to cover for the fact that they’re not funny. And then of course blaming their lack of success on “wokeness”. Not because they’re not good. Should they be censored? No. They’re censoring themselves anyway by not being funny enough to move to the next level.

Should they be condemned? No. That only makes them more high profile: when left alone they’ll disappear soon enough.

But should they then become endorsed by public figures as voices of some legit anti-woke opposition even though they’re really being “silenced” or “cancelled” just because they’re not good enough and so would be anyway?

Not that either.