Wokeness

This post was inspired by a recent op-ed by George Will titled "How America became nation of the woke and the wary". In it Mr. Will traces the origin of this phenomenon to 1991 when a female English instructor at a Penn State University branch demanded that a reproduction of Goya's "Naked Maja" hanging in her classroom be removed. The picture was removed, says Will, because a campus executive felt it could contribute to a "chilly" classroom climate thus violating sexual harassment law. While I cannot question the provenance of Will's assertion on this matter, it seems unlikely that said English instructor was the first individual to feel threatened by a work of art. Regardless, she was certainly not the last. Conservatives would have us believe that hypersensitivity is a monopoly of the left and the rest of us appear to have accepted this as gospel. And yet a little over a decade after this alleged incident, John Ashcroft, Attorney General under President George W Bush, ordered the naked bust of The Spirit of Justice, a statue in the Department of Justice, draped because he did not want to be seen in front of it when he spoke to the press and public. Apparently, extreme sensitivity is not a characteristic of the Left or the Right but is found all over the political spectrum. Fast forward to the present and I would say the Right has overtaken the Left in this area. What I am referring to is the spate of laws being passed by Republican legislatures and signed by Republican governors banning certain books from libraries and school curricula, the teaching of Critical Race Theory and the teaching of the role of slavery in American history because they unjustly make whites feel guilty about the sins of their ancestors. The rare veto of a trans-gender law in Utah was quickly over-ridden by the legislature. And let us not forget the mothers of all laws about hurt feelings are the laws being passed in Republican-controlled states calling into question the validity of free and fair elections if the outcome is not to their liking. George Will is a respected writer for good reason and I enjoy reading his work. I do wish, however, that liberals and middle-of-the-roaders would not accept without question the opinions of conservatives when they say things like this. I would like to add here that the ones most affected by the chilly climate in that Penn State classroom or Ashcroft's thin skin are the Naked Maja and The Spirit of Justice respectively! And please resist the urge to groan when I say that the rest of us would do well to take a chill pill and have a grain of salt handy when reading op-eds.