Has Woke a value or simply a problem with reality?

What is “Woke”?

As its origin is the USA lets see what a US dictionary says: Merriam-Webster: " chiefly US slang : aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)" “Attentive to facts and issues” .

I am open to correction but is it not the case that:

• Facts by definition exist in the past – they have solidified and are written in ink

• Issues exist in the present they are malleable and open to interpretation and multiple proposals for resolution in the future.

• Resolutions are created in the present and for as long as they remain there can be written in pencil, erased and rewritten. Once resolved they move to exist in the past – a resolution is a closure and as such written in the ink of history

It seems to me that the mission of “Woke” is to provide its believers and disciples, the “Wokerati”, a refuge from the realities of history. A place of “safety” in which you are free to invent history as you wish to experience it. A place where a personal view, reflection, memory takes on a position of equality with fact. A place where history is written in pencil, erased and redrafted at will. A place from which its influencers and believers demand de-hurtful retractions of indelible truths.

Retractions they believe can morph into redactions of historical facts.

In short adherence to the mantra of Woke seems to offer up an access to an alternative reality and narrative, one where personal experience and sensitivities rule and empower with absolute righteousness and the right to shout down and deplatform all who do not accept the true scriptures.

In short Woke has taken on the attributes and foibles of a religion.

A religion that, as with all religions that are unrestrained, has a visceral intolerance of non-believers. Is Woke actually the 21st Century incarnation of the Catholic Inquisition of 1184?, an incarnation that replaces ordeal by torture and fire with torment by twitter storm and anarchic protest and one that is rapidly bringing to life the new speak of an other year ending in 84 - Orwell’s 1984?

As with all religions the church at which the congregation of Woke is drawn to worship, and its Bishops and high priests, are reaping the trappings of office and wealth whilst preaching universal love and frugality (here the love of privacy, personal respect and frugality of consumption and travel to save the world and avoid the anti-god of global warming), whilst flying in executive private jets, living in mansions and using law war to suppress their detractors who point to their moralities lack of cloths.

Need a further example of their aim to re-educate?

I point you at the publisher Pengin’s New Speak editing of Roald Dahil’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and other books in which replacement is made of “Old Speak"

To example;

• Augustus Gloop can't be 'fat', the ( gender neutral) Oompa-Loompas, 'small'. It continues across years of childhood favourites;

• Mrs Twit's 'fearful ugliness' has been chopped to 'ugliness,

• Mrs Hoppy in Esio Trot is not an 'attractive middle-aged lady' but a 'kind middle-aged lady'.

• Gender is eliminated – referencing 'female' characters has been deemed “un-woke”.

• Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, once a 'most formidable female', is now a 'most formidable woman', while her 'great horsey face' is now called 'her face'.

• Fantastic Mr Fox's three sons have become daughters.

• In The Witches, their description as “bald under their wigs” is given the “dehurtfull treatment” by addition of new line: 'There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.'

• A witch posing as a 'cashier in a supermarket' now works as a 'top scientist' and Matilda now reads Jane Austen instead of Rudyard Kipling and;

• Not neglecting the dangers to Mental health as a focal point for sensitivity of potential readers the words 'crazy' and 'mad', used by Dahl and many others in a comedic manner are banished from the books.

Some one needs to remind the editors of the words of those more adroit -

"that words exist for a reason that is ageless and have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality."(Edgar Allan Poe)

To any right minded, free thinking individual the devotions of the wokerati are at best miss-placed at worst deliberately corrosive and their Church and God?

I leave you to decide.....