Seriously, who cares?

[EnergizedLib]

I see over social media, I see it on tweets and on article headlines complaining about "woke" this and "woke" that.

The definition of woke, per Merriam-Webster:

"aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)"

Okay, and this is bad, because? The Super Bowl had "Lift Every Voice and Sing" in addition to the Star Spangled Banner, and I'm supposed to be offended because?

I covered a local Pride event last summer on the date the Dobbs decision was handed down. Many people I interviewed used different forms of pronouns. Guess how much bearing somebody I don't personally know referring themselves to what they call themselves has a personal effect on my life?

I *do not* support exposing little children to explicit sexual content, but I *do* support teaching kids that people are different than them and they deserve their respect and love just like everybody else does.

What favors are we teaching children if we don't teach them about the history of racism in America, which still exists today? How are we benefitting children if we only teach the good parts of America's history and not the bad parts?

As I've said before here on this forum, kids learn more in school than simply a curriculum.

This culture wars stuff really is a non-issue. It's treated as a threat when it really doesn't affect us what other people do with their lives. This is their new political correctness war, in which, proving Lee Atwater right, their way of being racist and homophobic without saying the N word or the F word.

[Celerity]

1. profoundly disagree with this apparently ultra-privileged, utterly dismissive take:

This culture wars stuff really is a non-issue. It's treated as a threat when it really doesn't affect us what other people do with their lives.

seriously??

[EnergizedLib]

2. What do you find wrong about it?

I’m *for* people using pronouns and identifying as whoever they want to and it doesn’t affect me at all, not negatively at least.

Compare this to people who support legislation to exclude them from society.

[Celerity]

4. As a mixed race black lesbian, I look at the increasingly unhinged RW in America and see a mortal

threat to people like me. Their 'culture wars' are a massive part of this threat. They want to dehumanise us, erase us, disempower us, imprison us, crush us across every major vector of daily life, and, at the end of the day for the most extreme (and that number grows in both size and influence), exterminate us.

[EnergizedLib]

7. And I'm so sorry you have to go through that

The point of my original post was that what you do is your thing and you should be allowed to do your thing and nobody should be offended or affected by someone they most likely don’t know living in a way that doesn’t impact them.

You don’t deserve that, no one does. I’m not indifferent to culture wars, which need to be ended, not ignored. I just wish others would mind their own business about those who are different than them. How you live your life is of no concern to these extremists.

[usonian]

3. Culture wars are utter bullshit, except when they spur people to violent acts.

And they do.

[EnergizedLib]

5. Then that needs to change

My original post was meant to be anti-culture war, not that I am indifferent to them.

[Ocelot II]

10. Of course it needs to change. How do you suggest that be done?

Certainly not by blowing it off and pretending it's not an issue, because it is.

[EnergizedLib]

13. As far as I'm concerned

The only issue is that culture wars exist and we ought to stand up to them, but being anti-culture war is against these draconian policies, not indifferent to them.

[usonian]

11. Agree. But "hearts and minds" are hard to change.

Best one can do in a reasonable amount of time is to elect officials and enact laws that drop the hammer on violence and set a positive culture. Joe Biden is a great example of just that.

I go on at greater length in other posts.

One here:
https://democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=17657200
Ibram X Kendi used to believe in changing "hearts and minds" until he found that political action has a zillion times more payback.

And it's something we can all do.
Get out our votes.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

6. Who cares? The side's that weaponizing it. Now what?

[EnergizedLib]

8. But why?

Isn’t it a little stupid to do so and to huff and puff about it? Why are they so hung up this stuff? Don’t they have anything better to do than to wage all-out war on other people who look different or love someone different than them?

[Ocelot II]

15. Fear of the "other," racism, sexism, right-wing media influences,

all manner of complex reasons that have always existed and have become more powerful in the last few years in part, but not entirely, because of Trump's influence. It's much more complicated than people just being stupid, and it's not going to go away because we think it's stupid. To blow it off so easily as just some people being stupid is a manifestation of privilege if you aren't among the people who are directly and seriously harmed by the culture wars. If you're used to privilege, equality looks like oppression, and the privileged wagers of culture wars are feeling oppressed because people not like them are demanding equality.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

16. It's pretty clear they're hung up on it because they're racist bigots.

[meadowlander]

22. Also it sells ad space to other racist bigots.

[Ocelot II]

9. The culture wars *have* become a threat because the right wing has weaponized them.

They have passed laws in many states discriminating against LGBTQ kids in school by outlawing any discussion of gender, by limiting which bathrooms trans kids can use, by preventing trans student athletes from competing in certain sports, by prohibiting almost any discussion of Black history, even slavery and the civil rights movement. Women's reproductive rights are almost nonexistent in some states. In some states it's legal for "religious" people to discriminate against others (usually LGBTQ people) because they claim it offends their own religion. How can you say "culture wars stuff" is a non-issue? It's hurting real people in real ways. We don't think it should be an issue but unfortunately it is, in a very dangerous way.

[EnergizedLib]

12. I'm not saying culture wars are a non-issue

I’m saying the content of the culture wars are or should be a non-issue.

I’m not saying who cares about culture wars, I’m am saying who cares, or at least who should care, about who someone loves, what color someone is or if a woman has to make a medical decision to save herself?

[Caliman73]

14. Historically oppressed groups trying to achieve true equality, is a BIG threat.

I understand what you are saying regarding the "non-issue" but the reality is that the people who have real financial and social power in this country, and many people who do not have the power, but still benefit from privilege of being male, White, Christian, etc... see a lot to lose.

All of us who went to public school, have been steeped not in our true history, but in a mythology that holds the United States up as an "exceptional country". Even histories that note the "flaws" serious underplay them.

Just look at ANY history of Martin Luther King Jr. He's the guy who started the Civil Rights movement and was all peaceful and wanted us to "Judge each other by the content of our character not the color of our skin". He is beloved and an icon, and TOTALLY Whitewashed.

Too many people, even our our supposed side, buy into at least some of the ideas pushed by right wingers in these "non-issue" culture wars.

Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election in a landslide because the Right Wing was able to effectively use racial and sexual bigotry to lure people that were supposedly Democratic away. With the coordination of right wing media from the 90's onward, that message has been going out 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

It means something to more people than you think.

[EnergizedLib]

17. I'll tell you what is a farce

The teaching that America isn’t a racist country or that we don’t have a racist past, that’s as untrue as it gets.

As a straight, white male, I feel no threat from somebody who looks different than me or by who somebody loves. No person of color has ever been an affront to me, none of them have thwarted of my successes or caused any of my failures. That was all me, for better and for worse.

MLK is totally beloved every MLK Day and they work against his message the other 365 days.

So, in other words, many people are insecure bigots.

[old as dirt]

18. How many do you know?

No person of color has ever been an affront to me

Zero? Seriously?

Not our experience.

[Caliman73]

20. We will never fulfill the ideas in our foundational documents until we accept facts.

I agree that many people are insecure and are bigots, but the problem is deeper than that. We all grew up in a system awash in racial and gender based discrimination. For many, the reality has been that the US is a meritocracy and if you haven't been successful, it is because you are doing something wrong, not that there are any systems that have made it that much harder for certain people. There are incentives for people NOT to see that.

I am a man. I know that women have faced problems that I do not even have to consider in my daily life. I do not feel guilty or personally responsible for any of the history behind that, however, because I understand that, I now have a choice as to whether I continue to perpetuate attitudes and actions that prop up the system, or work to challenge and dismantle that system in any way I can. I do have to realize that by challenging and dismantling the system, that I am actively working to diminish or take away some of the advantages that I have received by simply being a man. I am okay with that. Many people, especially MRAs are not okay with that and they think that women get some kind of unfair advantage in society.

[old as dirt]

19. Might depend on who you are.

This culture wars stuff really is a non-issue

Although I’m not quite sure who it is a non-issue for.

I recall reading recently about how Florida was canceling math.

[EnergizedLib]

28. What I mean is

People of different orientations, what’s being taught in schools, are non-issues that people shouldn’t be fighting against. That’s not something people should be concentrating their energies on.

[SYFROYH]

21. You can refer haters to Erykah Badu.

Erykah:
“Woke is definitely a black experience — woke is if someone put a burlap sack on your head, knocked you out, and put you in a new location and then you come to and understand where you are ain’t home and the people around you ain’t your neighbors. They’re not acting in a neighborly fashion, they’re the ones who conked you on your head. You got kidnapped here and then you got punked out of your own language, everything. That’s woke — understanding what your ancestors went through. Just being in touch with the struggle that our people have gone through here and understanding we’ve been fighting since the very day we touched down here. There was no year where the fight wasn’t going down.”

She's so cool. So freakin cool.

[meadowlander]

23. One of the central cultural tragedies in the US is peoples' inability to mind their own business.

It makes it way too easy to manufacture outrage over stupid bullshit which, as you say, doesn't actually impact them in the slightest while ignoring things like lower wages, underfunded infrastructure and natural hazards responses, and proposed Medicare or Social Security cuts which actually do.

On the pronoun thing, it makes about as much sense for me to get in a huff over someone asking me to refer to them as them as it does if they asked me to use a nickname or an unusual pronunciation of their name.

But I'm a grown ass adult who understands boundaries and that someone elses' fundamental right to identify themselves how they like trumps the minor inconvenience to me of having an extra thing to remember about them. It's a shame the US in general is so psychologically and culturally impoverished so few of its citizens are able to understand basic boundary issues like that.

[EnergizedLib]

27. Finally some who gets it

The intent or meaning behind my original post was *not* to be dismissive of people of different orientations, skin colors, etc., but to dismissive towards people who huff and puff against them for being who they are.

People should just live their lives instead of making it more difficult for others who are different than them.

[Hortensis]

24. Culture warring is a national bonfire grown and weaponized to overthrow democracy.

Last edited Tue Feb 21, 2023, 02:34 PM - Edit history (1)

I think it's a mistake to be distracted from the bigger picture of what's happening because what's caused a third of American adults to run around with their hair on fire seem foolish to most people.

This isn't just the normal, angry, fearful backlash from people who've been on the losing side of cultural changes all their lives. That's been fanned into rage and organized and targeted against our governments, and the things you mention are whatever additional fuel RW plotters can come up with to throw on the conflagration. "Pronouns."

Add in their angry, aggrieved, radicalized counterparts on the left who've been lead to believe "the establishment" and its capitalist masters are the root of all problems (and the plotters absolutely do!), and that's a whole lot of people who think their answer is to destroy the democracy that keeps them from imposing their beliefs on the far larger but divided-we-fall majorities who assume they're too foolish and few to prevail.

Putin for just one has been very successfully weaponizing hostile populist movements energized by developing massive, angry grievance to take down foreign governments. Not to focus only on the "enemies foreign" busy busily fomenting this. Our "enemies domestic" by themselves would have had enormous successes using the same techniques of creating, inflaming and focusing the various resentments of this era.

Once again, a great battle to save our liberal democracy is on.

[Ms. Toad]

25. This feels very dismissive -

Very similar to the old "I don't see color." It erases our entire lived experience, a significant part of which is being the target of those culture wars because of the parts of who we are that you want to dismiss as no big deal.

Just as color has always mattered, so do gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

And why did you feel the need to declare, "I *do not* support exposing little children to explicit sexual content." Would that thought have even crossed your mind, had the focus of the culture wars been on marriage of mixed gender couples? Somewhere in your emotional make-up, you connect sexual orientation and gender identity to explicit sexual content, in a way you believed required an express limitation on what was allowed to be taught.

"Allies" who dismiss the reality of our lives as no big deal - or who feel the need to qualify their support with "but . . . " mean that we need to spend time and energy not only staying safe from those who want to literally erase, but also from those who claim to support us, but educating those who want to figuratively erase us and our lived lives.

I don't think that was your intent, any more than it was the intent of white folks who claimed not to see color. But it is the reality of how I experienced your post.

[EnergizedLib]

26. I might have worded this wrong

Of course you matter, you absolutely matter. I just don’t know why bigots care so much of who you are that they want to enact legislative barriers against who you are. Why is it a big deal and why can’t people just live their lives?

‘Somewhere in your emotional make-up, you connect sexual orientation and gender identity to explicit sexual content, in a way you believed required an express limitation on what was allowed to be taught.’

Not necessarily. People are different sexual orientations are called groomers, and while not all content is age appropriate, I’m for children learning people are different than them and they should and respect everyone.

‘"Allies" who dismiss the reality of our lives as no big deal - or who feel the need to qualify their support with "but . . . " mean that we need to spend time and energy not only staying safe from those who want to literally erase, but also from those who claim to support us, but educating those who want to figuratively erase us and our lived lives.’

I would say I’ve posted many times on here hinting towards being an ally, that I don’t see people of different orientations as threats, whereas as I see a lot of youth pastors as one.

The transphobic/homophobic narrative is really pounded and drummed on social media and I see it a lot, whereas I believe it’s manufactured.

[Ms. Toad]

30. Most groomers are heterosexual men.

Yet you connected your . . . But "no explicit sex talk" to your post about gay and transgender people. There's no reason for that, unless you have consciously, or unconsciously, bought into the misinformation being spewed by the right about us.

[EnergizedLib]

31. You might have a point

For what it’s worth, I don’t think explicit sex talk is appropriate, regardless of who it concerns, for a certain age group.

I am very much against these anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans bills, am horrified what’s happening in Florida and am not happy with the legislature of the state I’m in for trying to push a Don’t Say Gay bill. I’m for kids being taught to respect people of different orientations and what they call parental empowerment, I fear them empowering parents to raise their kids to be bigots.

[Ms. Toad]

32. I'm betting you don't feel the need to make that point in conversations

about heterosexual relationships and cis-gender individuals.

A female friend of my daughter's wore a T-shirt that proclaimed, "I love my girlfriend!" She was suspended by the vice principal. My daughter, along with a bunch of her friends, decided to wear the same T-shirts in support of her friend - and were threatened with suspensions if they did so. I had a pre-emptive chat with the vice-principal to let him know exactly what he would be walking into if he suspended my daughter.

His response: It's not appropriate to wear T-shirts advertising sexual activity. This vice principal wears a wedding band, and has a picture of his wife on his desk at work. My daughter's friends' T-shirt was no more about sexual activity than his wedding band or the photo of his wife. Especially as to the wedding ring, the wedding ring is arguably even more about sexual activity, since marriage, traditionally, marked the transition between abstinence and procreative sex).

This conflation of identity with sexual activity for gay and trans individuals, but not for heterosexuals and cis individuals happens extremely frequently, and is an integral part of their attack on us as purported sexual predators. And - it creeps into even liberal concersations and - sometimes when it is pointed out - the conversation shifts to the equivalent of "all lives matter," as you've shifted it here. It is crystal clear to those of us who are targets - but typically not even recognized as offensive when used by those who call themselves allies.

And it drains the energey we need for focusing on survival, and fighting the attacks on our lives when we have to spend so much energy educating our allies.

[EnergizedLib]

33. There was nothing with her shirt

Did they point that out to the vice principal? I don’t know what grade that was, but that’s a bit far fetched, especially since schools have relationships out in the open (hand holding).

I hope an ACLU complaint was filed. A suspension was harsh, and if he can advertise his relationship, why can’t she advertise hers?

The point of my original post isn’t that I’m uncaring towards people of different identities of orientations, just that it shouldn’t affect anybody to create harmful legislation against them for who they love.

[brooklynite]

29. I'm not woke...

I agree with all of the issue positions, but I find no need to capture those positions in a self-labeling that presents a target for our political opponents. As with "critical race theory", woke conveys an intellectual academia source which makes it less appealing for working class moderate voters.

Consider how successful the message "no, its DEMOCRATIC Socialism" has been.

[EnergizedLib]

34. Woke has become a buzzword for what they hate and fear

Old habits die hard, and bigots are fighting hard.