The dangers of ‘woke’ ideology

Re: “Police chief and school board remain at loggerheads on officers in schools,” column, March 5.

Call the phenomenon what you will — “woke” seems to be the pejorative in general use — far-left ideology is at the root of many social problems, in British Columbia, across Canada and North America, Britain and Europe.

On any day, a hundred podcasts discuss the threat to Western civilization posed by this power struggle. In my opinion, with good cause.

The movement has abandoned reason in favour of dogma and preordained outcomes, namely the deconstruction of existing “narratives,” institutions and governing bodies.

The evidence — in our schools and universities, governments, and on the streets — indicates this corrosive ideology is achieving its ends.

No surprise then that police, to whom it most often falls to deal with social collapse on the ground, are stymied by activists from protecting vulnerable citizens, including young students.

Hidebound Ideologues are not so much interested in visible evidence as they are in protecting the doctrinal purity of theories that have infiltrated academia and governments on every level. Witness the madness in municipal meetings, where foreign conflicts take precedence over local ordinance.

All that matters to these agitators is that any representation of the existing order — deemed “oppressive” in wokespeak — is named and shamed.

For five decades I voted left and still identify as liberal. Today, particularly since last October, I’m politically homeless.

What I think the new, purified left is missing — due to their blinkered view — is that, as the ’60s poet Bob Dylan predicted at the end of the 1970s, “a slow train is coming.” Because people trying to live through this unmoored-from-realitysocial-experiment have had enough.

Raymond Parker Sooke