Given a lifetime achievement award by The Screen Actors Guild on Feb. 23, Jane Fonda used the opportunity to demonize America’s apparent slide towards the political Right. Outraged by the flip dismissals of “wokeness” coming from various conservative commentators, she said quite simply: “Woke just means you give a damn about other people.” Her obvious implication was that those who voted for Trump don’t give a damn about others. But was her assertion valid or just another example of the intellectual bankruptcy of the contemporary Left?
The Woke, you see, are committed to the Neo-Marxist notion that those who lack Power or Wealth are always the victims of their “oppressors.” They therefore have little empathy whatsoever for successful, accomplished human beings! Wokeness is actually a form of dementia utterly devoid of compassion for anyone who does not qualify as a Victim. Hence our Leftist Zeitgeist rife with such ludicrous assumptions as the notion that as all Men are somehow Misogynists, all White people are Racists, all Wealthy people, greedy bastards!
Examples of the inanely simplistic definition of “Woke” offered by Fonda are everywhere. With the sympathy of the mainstream media, B.L.M. inflicted over 2 billion dollars in damages on thousands of U.S. businesses in 2020, many of them no doubt owned by hard working, middle class people. But hey, Blacks are a visible minority in the States and “woke” empathy precluded any rational discussion of the criminality of their behaviour. The same moral blindness informs the Trans issue discussed in my last blog. As Women constitute half of the species while less than 1% identify as Transsexuals, the latter have been supported in all sorts of initiatives which clearly entail assaults on Women’s Rights. Where is the Left’s empathy for young girls who have been pummelled in athletic competitions or terrified by the presence of penises in their washrooms and locker rooms? And what of those documented cases where Black students, because of D.E.I. statistical requirements, have gained admission to institutions of higher learning at the expense of Oriental students whose marks were far superior. Where’s the empathy for them and the thousands [millions?] of others who have failed to get jobs for which they were perfectly qualified because they were the wrong colour or gender?
No Ms. Fonda, Woke doesn’t mean you care for other people, it means you care about certain classes of people based upon a demonstrably superficial vision of the species. Hence the ludicrous enshrinement of George Floyd as a symbol of the supposedly systemic injustices inflicted upon Blacks throughout America, even though he was a career criminal who had shown no respect for Justice or other people throughout his entire life!