Defining “Woke”
I like what the lawyer said here, though I would argue that the concept goes even further:
• All of Earth’s people need to be treated fairly and equally. We have people worth hundreds of billions of dollars, living on the same planet as 1.5 billion people who can’t get a clean glass of water to drink. This is morally wrong.
• The United States has no more right to wage an aggressive war against Venezuela than Russia had a right to invade Ukraine.
• Public education should be supported, not destroyed.
• The death penalty is not a part of a civilized society.
• Science should form the underpinnings of government policy.
• Corporations should not be able to buy favorable lawmaking.
• Big Oil should be prohibited from using our atmosphere as its own private sewer.
One more thing: woke is a win-win proposition. Woke countries, e.g., Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, most of the rest of Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Iceland, and the rest are perennially at the very top of the world happiness rankings. Their governments actually care about their people, and their people care about each other and the quality of our environment.
This is a recipe for happiness. Human beings did not evolve over the last 200K years to become selfish, greedy, uneducated, impoverished, racist slobs.
There is a good reason that the United States is mid-pack in terms of happiness, and that very few Americans care one way or the other. We are almost completely indifferent to the wellbeing of others.
The problem facing traditional Western philosophy is that science has usurped so much of its turf over the past 100-or-so years, and this can only accelerate from here.
Someone told me the other day that he expects Trump to be impeached and convicted in the next few months. And it does appear that the president is losing the support of congressional Republicans, which stands to reason. Would you like to be remembered as a protector of a would-be dictator? Wouldn’t you at least want to be able to say that, at a certain point, you’d seen enough and stood up on behalf of the American people and the U.S. Constitution?
A reader notes: They should put that cocaine-pedaling Honduran president on one of those drug-running speed boats and send him back to Honduras with a detour to the coastline of Venezuela.
In preparation for my first book, “
This line from Kurt Vonnegut calls to mind what George Carlin said about the Earth’s expelling the human race. On two different occasions he used the following similes as to what the planet is doing:
When I ask people from foreign countries about their nation’s feelings on Trump, they commonly say, “We just feel sorry for you. We never thought this could happen in the United States.”
The website 
I’d like to have a conversation with the product packaging guy who thought he needed to provide instructions as to the use of coffee stirrers.
I’m surprised to see so much chatter to the effect that Trump is losing his grip on reality. He doesn’t seem any worse today than he did when he retook office almost a year ago. Yes, he’s criminally insane, but that’s nothing new; his antics are identical to the Trump we’ve come to know:
