Roll out the carpet, folks, for the Great American Circus has arrived. No more bearded ladies or fire-breathing clowns, no sir! Now, we’ve got ourselves an act more confounding than any old freak show—the spectacle of “wokeness”. It’s an unpredictable tide, washing over the nation, stirring up self-righteousness like silt at the bottom of a once placid river. A river that ran clear with what used to be good old-fashioned common sense.

There’s a fever in the air, can you smell it? It’s a fever for fairness, for justice, but it’s caught a strange wind and gone off-course. It’s running wild, bounding headlong into the chasm of the extreme, the absurd. We were once a nation of rebels, hell-bent on making our own paths, speaking our own minds. But this new culture – it’s about conforming, about fitting snug into boxes of righteousness, about policing every word, every thought, to be as inoffensive as possible.

American Flag
In this reinterpreted American flag, done in the style of Jackson Pollock, wokeism does cause the colors to run a bit. Original art by SOFREP

I’m all for knocking the power-hungry off their pedestals, shaking up the system and giving a voice to the little guy. God knows I’ve dedicated my life to that. But somewhere along the line, this ‘woke’ movement has twisted that noble pursuit into a freakish distortion of itself. We’ve moved from fighting for the silenced to silencing the fighters.

These new cultural luminaries, the self-appointed shepherds of the woke movement, they’re dealing in absolutes. It’s a strange and disturbing mirroring of the very tyrants they claim to oppose. Dissent is no longer a virtue, but a sin, a one-way ticket to ostracism.

There was a time when America stood as a beacon for free thought and open debate. We were rebels, mavericks, radicals, ever questioning, ever challenging. But today, under the weight of this woke frenzy, we’re in danger of becoming echo chambers, reverberating with a single note of sanctioned thought. A twisted paradox indeed – the tyranny of tolerance, the dictatorship of diversity.

Freedom is a messy thing, you see, as complex and chaotic as a dust devil in the Nevada desert. It means tolerating ideas that might make your blood boil, hearing out the other side even when you’re sure they’re spouting madness. And that’s what we’re losing, in this ‘woke’ storm, the ability to sit across from a man we disagree with and say, “I think you’re wrong, but by God, I’ll defend your right to be wrong.”

Don’t get me wrong; there are battles worth fighting. There’s still plenty wrong with this mad, chaotic world of ours. But the answers aren’t found in the merciless dogma of ‘woke’ culture; they’re out there in the wild winds of freedom and dialogue.

In our pursuit of fairness, let’s not lose sight of freedom. In our quest for justice, let’s not trample on the journey. The heart of America beats with the rhythm of the rebel, the radical, the maverick. Let’s not silence that beat with the relentless drum of ‘wokeness.’ Because if we do, we might just find that we’ve lost more than we’ve gained.