Angela Rains Light, a fellow citizen in my admittedly privileged community of Camarillo, California, published a strongly opinionated letter to the editor in our local Ventura County Star newspaper, a member of the USA Today family. That media’s published history is not known to be any more unbiased or reliable than the right-wing media she castigates. All issues facing our nation and its peoples are always nuanced, not a black and white diagram of Yin and Yang. Thus I felt she deserved a complete quotation and response.
Her letter:
GOP has gone ‘woke’ crazy
The Republican Party has obviously sent out a memo instructing its elected officials and their reliably deceitful rightwing media outlets to scream, “Woke, woke and more woke!”
What are they suggesting when they spew this word? That those who are “woke” believe in the civil rights of all Americans, not just those who look like them, share the same beliefs, and practice the same religion as they do? Are they insinuating that anyone who cherishes their freedoms is woke? In other words, those who want to be able to read the books and love the person of their choice, dress as they please, and learn about history as it happened versus the whitewashed, don’t-make-anyone-uncomfortable- with-actual-historical-accounts version; does this make one woke? Is it that those who are woke are defenders of democracy and social justice? Or is it that those who are empathetic, enlightened, and informed are just too woke for Republicans? Is being woke a bad thing or is it just a version of kindness and compassion? What exactly is it? Is the GOP’s woke hysteria a way of inflicting their hatred for and cruelty toward already marginalized communities?
Imagine the fear a transgender person must feel these days thanks to the GOP’s nefarious messaging about them. Or is it simply that because today’s Republican Party offers nothing of value to most Americans in terms of making their lives better — no policies that help working and middle-class citizens, no real solutions, only entitlements for the uberwealthy — that they must foment fear and rage through this pathetic campaign of anti-wokeism? Are performative politics and propaganda all they offer our nation? It appears so. And it’s all just another Big Lie intended to distract — this one laced with purposeful persecution — because for the dying Republican Party, this is all they are.
Angela Rains Light, Camarillo
My response (less likely to be published):
The Woke have lost the thread
Angela Rains Light’s letter of March 12 2023 displays remarkable bigotry. She broad-brushes Republicans with the whitewash of anti-wokeism. She appears to define being “woke” as those who see it as White Oppressors Killing Everyone who doesn’t share the same lifestyle, religion, beliefs, and skin color. Insisting on revision of history, she forgets history. The Republican party was founded to free those we had enslaved. Southern Democrats started the Civil War to maintain slavery. A Republican Congress passed the first Civil Rights law in1875. Democrats used the Compromise of 1877 to maintain social and economic slavery via Jim Crow. Our first progressive President, the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, was an avowed racist. Both parties equally disavowed “alternate” lifestyles. Although many Republicans contributed to institutionalized bigotry of all kinds, the Democrats carried that tradition as their foundation stone. This changed when a Democratic President discovered in the 1960’s that re-enslaving certain minority populations with government largesse could enhance that party’s power. Now many on the Left have discovered new power centers beyond Affirmative Action (a “favorable” bigotry), namely re-defining anyone not seen as “mainstream” socially or culturally as an oppressed minority who must be granted special additional preemptive rights by government. Any opposition must be vigorously or even violently canceled, censored, and suppressed. This same injustice is shown by those on the Right who seek, not to oppose “special rights” and “socially just history”, but to repress those who express their humanity in differing ways. The aspiration of America intended by the Framers and imperfectly evolved since, is to ensure before the law that all individuals may express their humanity as they individually see fit. That central thread must be followed in our historical accounts and our current actions.