In N.Y.C., Robynn Europe, a 39 year old Black woman employed by Equinox at an Upper East Side Gym, was recently awarded 11.25 million dollars in damages after having been fired for what she claimed were racial reasons. Problem is, in her 10 month stint with the company, she had been late 47 times! Fully admitting to her chronic tardiness, she nevertheless charged that she had repeatedly been mistreated by a White, male co-worker and that Equinox had fired her because it did not want to deal with her complaints. Equinox, on the other hand, said its employee handbook specifically stated that tardiness would not be tolerated and that that was the sole reason for her dismissal. Indeed she had been warned in April of 2019 that her continued failure to show up on time would lead to her termination. As a result, the company’s lawyers asked for a reconsideration of the case, arguing that the jury’s decision was rooted in “sympathy and emotion” rather than Facts. They were in essence describing the fundamental dementia of the political Left, a religious sect governed by sentiment rather than simple common sense.
It would seem that both parties involved were somewhat to blame for what transpired. If there was in fact a racist male jerk tormenting Robynn, he ought to have been fired. But at the same time her tardiness was legitimate grounds for termination. My question is, was she really entitled to an 11.25 million dollars settlement? As a Black Female, Robynn Europe occupies two of the chief categories of the “oppressed” identified by the Neo-Marxist Left, while Equinox is a successful Capitalist enterprise. In such conflicts must big corporations always be deemed the villain, whatever the Facts? Where racial issues are involved, are people of color always the innocent victims, whatever their behavior? Is personal responsibility no longer considered important in our “woke” culture?
Apparently it is Not. Republicans at the U. of Pittsburgh planned to hold a public debate on April 18 entitled “Should Transgenderism be Regulated by Law?” Prominent “conservative” pundit Michael Knowles was to be one of the participants. Having approved the debate, the University made public its conviction that it might in fact be “toxic and hateful” to its Trans students, implying that some form of protest would not be inappropriate. Predictably, approximately 250 malcontents showed up, some of them using smoke bombs to disrupt the proceedings. Having told campus Republicans they would be charged $2,000 to insure the maintenance of order throughout the debate, University officials subsequently demanded $18,000 to offset the cost of both the additional security needed as well as the damages incurred by the event. So the U. of Pittsburgh incited the violence while “woke” rioters committed it, but it was campus “conservatives” who were charged with paying for it. To anyone of common sense, this was once again a brazen violation of justice rooted in ideological bias rather than any respect for the principle of personal responsibility.
Such is the very essence of “wokeness.” Those who suffer from it are utterly self-centered while those who condone it mistake their compassion for what is in fact a recipe for the moral collapse of society. No doubt the “conservatives” engaged in the aforementioned debate at the U. of Pittsburgh would argue that while they are sympathetic to those of a Trans orientation, they cannot accept their fabricated, self-serving hypothesis that Gender is a social construct, that Heterosexuality is in no way the Human Norm. Apparently it is not enough to embrace those who, for whatever reason, deviate from that norm, we must deny the Objective Facts of Human Biology out of deference to their feelings. Hence a ludicrous world in which individuals born Male who now identify as Female are allowed to dominate various athletic competitions against biological Females as if they were in no significant way different from them. The very results of these competitions prove the absurdity of this assumption. It is grossly unfair to the women involved but hey, women make up approximately 50% of the species while transgenders only a fraction of 1%, and in the absurd Ethos of the woke Left, underdogs are always right, no matter the ignorance or arrogance of their ideas or behavior.
ASK Academy, a middle school in Rio Rancho New Mexico, prides itself on its “progressive” approach to matters of sexual orientation, providing All Gender Restrooms for its students. Recently, the mother of a young girl there discovered, in reading her daughter’s diary, that she had been raped as a 12 year old in Oct. of 2021 while using one of those rooms. While she told no one of her violation, her diary read “I was raped! I was raped!” Sadly, she was the victim not only of her violator, but of the sheer stupidity of her school’s administrators who, out of empathy for the Trans community, ran the school as if heterosexuality was but one of many legitimate sexual orientations, indeed as if the powerful attraction between Men and Women formerly thought to be a Biological Human Norm, was really just another patriarchal delusion. The little girls in question, whose identity has not been revealed, summarized quite simply the dementia of the “woke,” those who put their own self-interest before everything and everyone else, including the facts of Objective Reality, when she recently stated: “By them saying the only thing that matters is how they feel and not how I feel is very selfish of them.”