‘WOKE’ IS A JOKE (and it’s a religion)! You know how it goes: You invite a ‘woke’ friend to your house and they spend their whole time checking your lifestyle. First, they chastise you bitterly for using paper kitchen towels (which they spotted in one of the drawers they went through the moment they first arrived). Then, when they use your bathroom, they come out shocked that you use toilet paper which hasn’t been recycled a sufficient number of times and they checked out all the “utterly harmful ingredients” in your toilet cleaner and tell you that you are completely destroying the environment and how irresponsible you are and the planet doesn’t have much time left because of people like you.

If you crack a joke, they look confused as they struggle to work out if they should be laughing at it (i.e. is your joke politically, religiously, or socially incorrect?). When, during their lengthy story allegedly providing “proof that police only kill black people”, you tell them that you would only ever ‘take the knee’ before God and under no other circumstances, the horror on their faces is the equivalent of having witnessed close-up a dreadful accident in which a hapless individual had been crushed to a pulp in a vast pool of blood. Everything you say to them or in front of them is being checked in their mind to see if it contravenes their sensitivities about race, gender, Islam, sexuality, ableness, etc. And it never lets up. Their little ‘wokeness’ computer is whirring continuously. Like a rabid member of the Nazi youth brigade, or teenage commies in the USSR and Maoist China (where the term “politically correct” was invented), or doctrinally-obsessed religious people. The only question that is ever in their minds is: “Are you correkt?” They are programmed to be continually checking which “i” you have not dotted, or which “t” you have not crossed?

When you finally sit down to that wholesome meal which you have lovingly made for hours, they are constantly asking you for a list of ingredients of every single dish to see if it could trigger one of their many ‘syndromes’ and ‘intolerances’ and thus might make them ill or even die. They also cannot wait to tell you how they have Asperger’s (which seems to have taken over in trendiness from having been an Indigo or Crystal Child, which were some of the old New Age narcissistic “I’m a special person” labels). Then, having completely exhausted you with all that and gone home, leaving you reeling about your lack of ‘wokeness’, you see a photo of them on social media looking triumphantly smug with their sleeve rolled up and a Band-Aid on their upper arm and a thumbs-up sign. That is one load of ingredients they never checked or asked about! 😉 Then, when you die because you don’t have a Band-Aid like them, they will gloat over it, using you as an example of bourgeois self-centredness (oh, the irony!). In any case, they’d been harbouring a major grudge against you because of those ionic surfactants in your loo and the fact that your scrumptious apple crumble (which they ungraciously declined) didn’t use organic fruit. Yeah… ‘Woke’ is a Joke alright (and it’s a religion)…

© 2021, Alan Morrison / The Diakrisis Project. All Rights Reserved. 
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]