Wake Up – Our World is a Better Place for Woke.

There you go. That’s what woke means. Yep, the same word that is now bandied about as an insult by people like Piers Morgan and Andrew Neil. Men who have platforms to promote their disdain for people who are aware of racism and social injustice.

Here’s what has happened in my lifetime, because of political correctness and woke being part of our society.

Race:

When I was a kid and a young adult there were multiple words used in everyday conversation that if you heard one today would shock. Black and Asian people were on television, but only to be the butt of jokes in programmes like Love Thy Neighbour, which normalised the use of pejorative terms. Other races were not second class citizens, they were not even the same species as us white folk. I used those words. We all did. At school from the age of around seven. There was no awareness that there was anything wrong. Until the new wave of comedians in the 70s started telling us. Angry men like Alexi Sayle, and other new wave comedians brought us to be aware of ourselves.

And yet we were also the butt of racism, that we would not even notice. Irish jokes were part and parcel of the comedians’ repertoire. Every one was about how stupid we were. In Northern Ireland we told them! We thought that the jokes referred to the South. That is until we went to England and realised that to them we were all the same, and all stupid.

Thanks to woke the lives of people from different races and countries is 1000 times better, and we haven’t even got it right yet.

Gay Rights

Here are the words that we used to abuse gay people, in a similar acceptance of our right to say whatever we liked about people, particularly if they were a minority. I don’t even like writing this, but here goes: Fruit, poof, nancy boy, gayboy, limp wrister, mincer…

Imagine that. We were funny weren’t we? With casual cruelty these words were used in school playground, but also in conversations at dinner parties, in everyday chat about so and so. With total disregard for the horrific impact on people who were already struggling with how to talk to their parents and friends. Who were made to feel outside society by the flood of jokes and characterisations that were never ever positive. Young people ended up suicidal, and we didn’t hear about it because we had already forced them underground.

In Ulster we had Ian Paisley attacking gay people with a campaign, yes a campaign, placards and protests, to save Ulster from Sodomy. I stood on the steps of the Student’s Union and shouted back at him and his moronic supporters as they tried to stop a theatre group performing.

Our first realisation came with music. Bowie being androgynous and not concerned about being thought gay. The Tom Robinson Band led us in Sing If You’re Glad to Be Gay from the stage of the Whitla Hall. We were learning. We were being taught.

Sex

Women are still fighting. There is still real discrimination in work and in how women are treated. The golf club I belong to has equal rights for women. How advanced are we? Well, it’s starting on the 1st November.

But the woke brigade think that women do protest too much, there is still an attitude that they are being given rights by men, not that rights are intrinsic and not the gift of one set of people to another. Violence in the home against women is still not seen as the same as violence in the street. The recent response from the Met to the revelations around attitudes to women has been pathetic.

All of these changes have been as the result of the dreaded political correctness, now rebranded as woke.

Well, I am woke, I try hard to be better at being woke. I will be happy to be labelled as such. If you aren’t there is something wrong with you, not the woke supporters.