Did Wokism Ever Really Matter? - How Fantastical Jamborees Come And Go With Little Notice

Vicki Chalmers had organized an open house for all her friends and colleagues to celebrate the works of a poet she had tutored at the historically black college where she was a professor.  The young woman, LaShonda Evans, had come from a tough neighborhood, and had been admitted to give a particularly urban take on the black experience. 

 Her essay had described her childhood as the daughter of a Fentanyl-addicted single mother and an incarcerated father, with two gangbanger brothers out on bail, and the sound of gunfire keeping her awake at night. 

The girl had no academic record to speak of.  She was truant for most of her high school years, failed even the most basic remedial math and reading, but was moved along with her class because of what her teachers saw as a budding poetic talent.  Given the school's low overall performance - it ranked lowest of all DC public high schools - anything more than coloring between the lines was given special credit. 

Vicki, as Chair of the English Department, took it on herself to recruit students from the inner city, particularly those who showed an aptitude for written expression, and when she visited the Isaiah P. Bradley high school, she found just the candidate she was looking for.  Although the girl was barely articulate, the poems she had written moved Vicki to tears, for they described in simple, but evocative verse, the fortitude and positive nature of the young writer

Here I sits, on the stoop

While my dog makes a loop

He three legs make him jump

Fourth one just a stump

The poem went on to tell how the dog got his leg shot off during a gunfight, and how she wrapped it up with a baby diaper she found in the gutter and carried it home to Apartment  65D, C-Block in the Franklin Lewis Homes. 

He OK now, but can't lift his leg to piss

No matter no mind, I still give him a kiss

So, LaShonda Evans matriculated at Vicki's college in the Fall, and began her full load of remedial courses; but Prof. Chalmers had overestimated the girl's level of socialization and intellectual ability, and before the first quarter was over, she had recorded a string of zeros or 'Absents' on her record and  despite Vicki's personal attention had scribbled only a few lines of verse.

Not one to give up, Vicki kept at it, even inviting the girl to her home in a white neighborhood of suburban Washington where she lived with her husband, son, and Irish terrier.  The girl had never been out of Anacostia, and for her Chevy Chase was like another country, and after Vicki had driven her home after a pleasant afternoon, she discovered that the priceless Revere silver tea service was gone, pilfered by her young charge. 

'I don't blame her', she said to her husband, Rob. 'She's had a tough life'; but Rob was unmoved and pissed that one of his family's heirlooms was on its way downtown to be  hocked, melted down, refashioned, and sold. 

Yet, Vicki persisted, and despite nominal academic progress, kept LaShonda in her sights as a special project, and only when she was caught dealing the dope Pharoah Jones had given her for sale to her college brothers and sisters, she was dismissed. 

Vicki was chastened but not bowed. There could be no turning back on the mission to help the underprivileged, put upon, oppressed, and marginalized black population.  It wasn't enough that she, a white woman, was teaching at an all-black college - these students were the best and the brightest of their race - she had to do more. 

Yet the tide had turned, the good old days of Martin and Ralph were long gone, racial integration was a thing of the past, and the new world was that of Black Lives Matter, an organization which summarily and rudely had rejected her application. 

Not only that, despite her scholarship and passionate tutelage of black students, she had become nothing more than 'that white bitch' who didn't know her place, was never given the right time of day, and had only a desultory showing in her classes. So she turned to other issues on the progressive agenda.

Vicki was as straight as an arrow, and throughout most of her life wanted nothing to do with anything left of sexual center.  At college she had been friends with Amanda Finch, a butch from San Francisco, but when Amanda suggested some dildo and likker license times, Vicki demurred and hardened against the sexual fringe.  Now in this woke, inclusive era, it was time to revisit the issue. 

She befriended a well-known lesbian on the faculty, had drinks with her in a gay bar on Dupont Circle, and did her best to look pert and interested when her colleague made unmistakable sexual overtures.  She grit her teeth and went to bed with the woman, but rinsed her mouth out for a week afterwards,  and while Vicki was still very much committed to the cause of gay rights, she would keep her support theoretical. 

Now humming to the louder tune of progressive causes, she tried her hand at climate change, the gender spectrum, and capitalism, but each time came up dry.  Climate changers were Armageddon wannabees, streetcorner preachers of doom and gloom anxious to hurry up the warming climate so that their prophecies could be fulfilled.  They convoluted every variation in weather to conform to their a priori conviction that earth's climate was warming beyond control.  

More ice on the Antarctic's Ross Ice Shelf? Less frequent sun spot activity.  Colder winters in the American South? Disruption of the Atlantic currents caused by orbital dysfunction. Consistently normal tides along the North Carolina coast? Temporary atmospheric variations at high altitudes. 

Even with her modest scientific college education, Vicki sensed that something was off-kilter and unhinged about these climate change Cassandras.  Their hysterical, whirling dervish, St. Vitus' dances of the end of the world seemed out of whack.  

The gender spectrum which had seemed reasonable before cracks began to show in the woke agenda, now seemed no more than political idolatry, a chimera of idealism gone rogue.  What was she thinking when she she championed Brenda Johnson who became Brandon Johnson then Be-Linda Johnson-Vibberts, then flouncy girly girl Brenda again?

As for socialism, neo-Communism, and Marxist-Leninist calls for world revolution? Vicki was quite happy in her $1.8 mil Chevy Chase home, driving a late-model BMW, and watching her stock portfolio triple in value. 

 

It was hard for Vicki to shed the mantel of uber-woke progressivism that she had worn so long. Without the comforting cloak of self-assuredness - absolute certainty about the new world of gender fluidity, socialism, environmental epiphany, and the brave new world of communalism - the world at first looked bleak and colorless; but within a short time, the reality of normal, historic socio-economic conservatism began to give it tint and attractive shading.

'I told you it was horseshit', her husband told her when she resigned from the Historically Black College where she was a professor and returned her membership card to every wild-eyed, do-good, reformist organization in town.  She was finally her own woman again. 

After only one year since a conservative president took over the White House and attacked the vanity and absurdity of climate Armageddon, gender folly, adolescent socialist dreams, waves of black and brown 'irregular migrants', wokism is not only in retreat but disappearing from sight. 

The black man is no longer the sentient being of the African forest, atop the human pyramid. The climate may be changing, but only according to the million year cycles that have always ruled the earth.  Capitalism, free markets, and supply and demand have raised hundreds of millions out of poverty in China and India, and continue to fuel American entrepreneurial genius. 

Wokism never mattered, and if anything it will be a footnote to history, more like the freak show at a Barnum & Bailey circus, a side-liner never headliner. 

Good riddance, say Americans who were force fed woke nonsense during the penitential Biden years, now happy that the world has turned once again and things are right and proper. 

Meanwhile Vicki and her husband are living in their Tampa Bay condo, happy as can be, with all the woke  horseshit in the rearview mirror.