How did we get to where political correctness and woke-ness rule in our society? – Paris Post Intelligencer

Sometimes its very hard to sort a thought or line of thoughts because a clear answer or understandable conclusion cannot be reached that would bring the thought to a logical conclusion.

But, there are times when the thought creates a thread that seems to unravel many other thoughts that may be related, or not, causing no clear answer to be reached.

The thought keeps nagging though, and some ruminations on the thought can only offer partial clear answers. I think some of my thoughts may open a dialogue on one such rumination.

One thought that persists is how did we get to the place the nation is in today, where political correctness (PC) and the woke philosophy has taken such a deep hold on our society and body politic.

Being a believer in history and how it reflects on the present, I have a sense that PC has evolved from a need to civically address an injustice, a tool to destroy dessent from anything but the accepted PC or woke position in vogue at the moment.

As far as I can trace this phenomenon, their origins are a mystery with at best guesses as to when they started but woke in this instance is being conscious of racial discrimination in society and other forms of oppression and injustice.

Woke has been around in the black community since at least 1942, when it was used in the Negro Digest. PC is the avoidance of language or behavior considered to be discriminatory or offensive to certain groups of people.

The PC origin can be traced back to 1917, where it first appeared in the Marist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution, used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

PC is generally tied to the early Soviet Union, where the whims of those in power continually kept society in an upheaval, using PC as their weapon of choice. The government would put out, through its control of the media, conflicting goals or policies that never let the population know for sure where it stood or what was the proper stance they were required to take.

PC and woke philosophies are tied together by their need to make society adhere to words, terms or positions that are contrary to the norms historically in place. Altering accepted beliefs of the time or forcing society to alter its principles to conform to a different position.

If, for instance, a society has an entrenched belief with an idea about one segment of society that is based on flawed truths, then in order to rectify that flawed truth, society accepts the idea that a particular word or identity must be changed as a way to resolve the flawed truth.

I liken it to the acknowledgment of society that the common description of blacks in my youth was negro or the N word. At the time, these were the most common words used to identify blacks, without exception, across the country.

As society began to become aware of the way blacks felt, and still feel, about the N word, society started to accept the descriptions that blacks found acceptable, thus the politically correct way blacks wanted to be addressed.

As far as I can find, this was the first obvious example of political correctness, in this country, that changed the terminology used to describe a group based on their self-identity.

It became clear that in order to be politically correct, you refrained from using the N word to describe blacks and, at the same time, the word Negro went out of vogue, being replaced with African American or black.

PC evolved from the Marist-Lenist meaning, adherence to a political position, to a linguist application. PC permitted different groups to alter society through the use of what they determined to be proper language and usage of language to describe themselves.

In essence, PC weaponized language; language was used to force society into positions when it was not in conformity with PC. Language became the weapon of choice for groups that wanted a voice in society.

Even though many of these groups were very small minorities, they used political correctness to force society to acknowledge their position, unquestioned, without debate.

Almost every group that has risen to the forefront of societal change: gay rights, womens rights, civil rights, gender rights or any of the multiple segments of society, demanding this or that change in society to be made, to accommodate their sliver of society, have used PC to force the rest of society to conform to their demands.

Clearly, there is and was a place for minority groups to ask for, or even demand, societal changes because of the obvious discrimination against them. All the different rights groups in society have legitimate grievances that society should address.

But when those groups exceed their true grievance and brow-beat society into positions beyond their actual grievance with PC, society suffers. If any group uses intimation to suppress any other group, it will lead to divisiveness and the splintering of society.

PC is a weapon, and a weapon that has been used effectively by minority groups to demand changes in our society and body politic.

The weaponizing of language has resulted in keeping the country in a constant state of flux, where no one is sure of whether they are being politically correct or not when we are dealing with each other, and that is tragic. The end result of PC is confusion and fear.

Woke has come into use in the last few years to further intimate society by presenting arguments by inference that makes an individual an immediate outcast from society just by inferring that this or that person has committed the sin of being politically incorrect, even without factual basis for claims made against them, but only by accusation.

When that accusation becomes the face of the claim without factual support, what happens to objectivity and the rights of the accused?

Logically, one would say that when a police officer kills someone or uses excessive force and violates the law while injuring or killing that person, then that police officer should be prosecuted to the fullness extent of the law. Thats why we have laws in this country to protect people from overzealous policemen/women.

But in a woke culture, not only is the law-breaking policeman accused of a crime, the entire police apparatus is lumped together with the policeman committing the crime.

Instead of developing the facts and prosecuting the individual, woke-ness insists and demands outlandish concessions unrelated to the incident. When we apply woke-ness to an incident, it becomes much to easier to defame, defund and label all police officers as evil set on attacking innocent black men.

With the use of woke in the past few years and the continuing use of PC, society has accelerated down the road of disintegration.

PC and woke harken back to other misguided ideas from the past, such as the Salem Witch Trails, the Red Scare of the 1950s, the only good Indian is a dead Indian and the anti-Irish, anti-Italian, anti-Jewish views.

If we look at what PC and woke-ism are, it doesnt take long to realize that when the pressures created by PC and woke-ness are applied to society, that society can very easily lose its sense of unity.

So I am left with initial questions of how PC and woke-ness have taken such a hold on our body politic and why are they so influential in our culture? I know what they are and how they are used by one or the other parts of society against some other part of society, but I do not understand why.

I dont understand why we as a society, who proudly believe in our freedoms and liberties, then turn around and allow the weaponizing of our language to further one groups desire to overlord the rest of society.

I dont understand the concept that each and every minority has power over the majority at every level of society through the power of PC and woke-ness. I dont understand why we are failing each other by allowing one segment of society to dictate what we can say, think, interact with each other, how we conduct business and what we teach our children.

Knowing what I do about PC and woke-ness and the history of, especially, political correctness, I have very uneasy feelings about our ultimate future. I already see PC and woke-ness attacking the very people who first used it against their initial targets.

And that is my greatest fear, because when we create a continuous state of flux and societys ideology is constantly in a fluid motion where nothing can gel or set up into a solid state, I fear we will be left with continuous whiplash where we will not have a solid set of ideals to keep us as one.

One out of many, not many out of one, is our national motto, and if we cannot accept the fact that this nation is made up from many different cultures, races, nationalities, religions and from every corner of the world, we will lose the thing we should be most proud of: even though we come from very different backgrounds and places, we are here by choice and one of the whole.

I hope my shared rumination will create some conversation, knowing that what has been said is not the only answer, but the questions should be explored, even though they may not be resolved.

BERNARD LESLIE is a beekeeping expert who lives beside Kentucky Lake in the northeast corner of Henry County. His email address is bleslie0515@gmail.com.

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How did we get to where political correctness and woke-ness rule in our society? - Paris Post Intelligencer