(Opinion) Words matter (or they should).
They are the meat in the social media sandwich which appears to be one of the main sources of energy fueling our ever-crazier world.
Remember the school playground chant: “Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones but Words Will Never Hurt Me”?
Wrong! They can and they will.
But that doesn’t mean they are somehow inherently bad. Just cast your minds back to Shakespeare’s “Words, words, words” or Lincoln’s 272-word Gettysburg Address.
The origins of the word ‘woke’, now being tossed around like a hot potato at a barbecue is being aware or well informed in a political or cultural sense.
Its use often describes someone who has “woken up” to issues of social injustice.
One would expect that this awakening would be viewed as a positive step forward in a world too anchored in blind prejudice.
Being well-informed was certainly a virtue when I was growing up. If being well-informed was somehow bad, what was the point of going to school in the first place?
Despite its use by some as a derogatory umbrella for lots of those guys who don’t think the way you do, not surprisingly, focus groups suggest that most people don’t even know what “wokeness” means, or why they should fear it.
In fact, the focus group views, admittedly a small sample of Florida voters, give a real insight into how words matter.
“When it takes six times as long to explain wokeness as it does to reject it”, it’s not surprising that a good percentage are going to reject it”.
How they reject it matters too.
Those who understand what ‘woke’ means sit happily on both sides of the aisle. Some of my best friends are ‘woke’ and they have very different and opposite political views.
One wonders when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declares, “Florida is where woke goes to die,” most of the focus group members didn’t have any clue what ideology he’s trying to bury.
And anyway, who wants to go to a cemetery when you can bask on Miami beach or delight at Disneyland?
Perhaps the hapless ex-press secretary for President Donald Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, chosen to rebut President Biden’s State of the Union Address might have found a better way to spend her evening.
It’s a losers’ task at best, even for a seasoned press secretary, and Governor of Arkansas, and even if you have gotten an advance copy of what the president is going to say to help you prepare.
It must be very hard to rise beyond the obvious partisan ‘talking points. She didn’t manage to get over the bar.
She should not have mixed up which of the two warring political parties was, as Nobel laurate Paul Krugman wrote, “mainly focused on bread-and-butter issues that matter to regular people.
It’s the Republicans, not Democrats, who are the culture warriors who’ve lost touch with ordinary Americans’ concerns.”
If you are a serious cultural warrior, there would appear to be lots of enemy encampments which need to be protected.
For example, as reported by Montana Public Radio, Republicans in the Montana state legislature would ban teaching “scientific theory” in public schools.
That’s a little hard to get my mind around when you consider that would toss out the window, among other radical ideas, Isaac Newton’s 1687 theory of gravity.
That would likely test if, when tossed out the window, Newton’s theory would fall to the ground and become scientific fact or just stay suspended in the air forever.
And the same fate would befall other wild ideas like Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the theory of evolution, to mention just a few.
Only “scientific fact” must be taught. The bill states that the state board of public education “may not include in content area standards any standard requiring curriculum or instruction in a topic that is not scientific fact.”
Wow!
If that is not weird enough, consider Florida state House candidate Luis Miguel who seriously suggested on his social media accounts (from which he has now happily been banned): “Under my plan, all Floridians will be able to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF, and all other federal troops on sight. Let freedom ring.”
I’m not sure I like that ringing sound.
Advocates of free speech (and I am certainly one of them) put different limits on what constitutes ‘free’ speech and where speech should be restricted.
Words matter and calling for the shooting of federal agents as his patriotic response to the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence seems to me a bridge way too far.
Oft quoted is the famous Justice Oliver Wendell Holme’s opinion: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
What if Luis Miguel’s plan caused some federal agent to be shot? Would that be any different from the possible panic of ‘falsely shouting fire in a theater’, and shouldn’t he be prosecuted for inciting violence?
I wouldn’t want to be Luis defense attorney.
Imagine we are spectators at a Super Bowl, pitting the Woke Eagles against the MAGA Warriors.
That’s actually a little like what we have today. Perhaps the team with the best words will take home the trophy.