Already Awake
I'm not "woke." But I'm also not "anti-woke."
In the earliest days of the "woke movement," I thought that it made some sense. There are too many conservative idiots out there who are entirely too dense to get what "inclusiveness" is all about.
Unfortunately, the louder the wokeists got, the more aggressive the anti-woke crowd became, and thus was born an arms race, so to speak. Both sides are becoming equally aggressive, attempting to force their agenda on the rest of the world.
Consequently, neither side is winning anyone over. Anti-wokers have taken on an almost militant attitude (not surprising, since most of them are right-wingers, famously narrow-minded militants), while their foes are becoming entirely too self-absorbed for their own good (not surprising for leftists), and threaten to shoot themselves in the foot.
Where does that leave people like me? People sympathetic to some aspects of the woke culture but repulsed by their growing all-or-nothing attitude, while also refusing to identify with the myopic anti-wokeres?
It leaves us with only one position: anti-extremism. Because that's exactly what the whole woke-wars has begat: two groups of radicals who are losing all creditability due to their extremist positions.
Thus I'm neither woke nor anti-woke. If anything, I'm anti-both.
I'm sick to death of the idiotic "Go woke, go broke" mentality. But likewise I'm sick to death of "How do you identify? Him, her, they, it, non-binary, quasi-digital, alien...?" I mean, what the actual fuck?
It's time for both sides to bring it down several notches, because they're both threatening to lose members to the growing group of us who sit in the middle, disgusted with both positions, who want everyone to sit down and shut the fuck up, if only to reduce the noise by several decibels.
The "woke-wars" are ruining it for everyone. Comedians can't tell jokes for fear of offending someone. Employers can't hire someone for fear of losing potential recruits. Movie producers can't make movies without including non-traditional couples for fear of losing part of their audience. But then, the same movie producers can't make movies without any non-traditional couples for fear of losing the other part of their audience. It's a Catch-22 that leaves us middle-of-the-road folks with no decent movies to watch.
Already, too many institutions are scrambling to make certain that their job application forms have no less than fifteen pronouns from which to choose. For the love of Mother Earth, cut it the fuck out!
Undeniable fact: people are born with a gender. Some people may decide to physically switch their gender somewhere along the line (hopefully in their adulthood; the most disturbing thing is reading about youths who go through the procedure). Fine, I'll grant that much. But to identify as "non-binary"? News flash: that does not change your physiology! You can identify as whatever the fuck you want, but your body is still going to be male or female, whether real or fabricated. That is, unless you're willing to spend the money to remove your genitals entirely, and truly exist as an "it." I have no doubt someone out there has already done this. And in my own admittedly anti-woke opinion, that's just sick. My gut says they're being disruptive for the sake of being disruptive as a means to seek attention by unnecessarily making an irrational point.
What does all of this say about us as a species? We've become entirely too indulgent. We're allowing our culture to bend to the will of a few individuals who, for whatever reasons, choose to rail against Nature, which needlessly places a growing financial burden on the rest of us. We're headed towards the fall of Rome all over again.
Bottom line: such people belong to a minuscule, exceedingly tiny, infinitesimally small minority hell-bent on disrupting the whole of society in order to placate their very singular, unnatural attitude. Do they honestly expect all of humanity to reorganize entire systems just to please all three of them?
Personally, I prefer not to identify as "he" because of the male stereotype. But, you know what? There's no pronoun for a gentle, sensitive heterosexual man. So, I just deal with it, as much as it bothers the shit out of me.
It's time for the whole woke concept to go away. It's doing nothing but hobble society. The core concept might have been good (emphasis on past tense), but now it's turned into a freak show. And if anyone is offended by the term "freak show," well then... good. Because that's exactly what such people are threatening to turn humanity into. All just to satisfy 0.000001% of the population that insists everyone else must change to accommodate them.
Some of us might have agreed... before. Now some of us are turning against wokeism. I say "some" because it's not just me; I have like-minded friends who are sick and tired of it, hopeful that all of this bullshit goes away... soon.