Letter to the Editor: Are we Woke?

Dear Editor
Are we ”woke” or simply willful or complicit mushrooms?
As an increasingly elderly, predominantly independently voting (thru more than half a century of voting citizenship) Vietnam veteran and retired educator, I find myself increasingly unable to keep my jaw from dropping to my knees at the total lack of knowledge and/or abysmally willful ignorance of so many of my fellow citizens in these days.
Where shall I start?
1. Climate Change - Inevitably Earth denigrating climate change has been obvious to all but the most politically contortionist pseudo “Scientists” for over half a century now. Yet we, year after year, greedily and obliviously purchase exorbitant McMansions, gas guzzling vehicles and other “wonderfully” idiotic and/or useless adult “toys”. Meanwhile we increasingly pay through taxes, insurance and our lives for our willful ignorance of increasingly frequent multi-billion dollar climate catastrophes.
2. Immigration - Climate change (drought and/or global politics (dictatorships and political idiocy) and population increase in the third world are inevitably resulting in a huge (and inevitable) push for our fellow human beings to provide somewhere on this God Given planet/our Earth for their children and their families. This is, as we’ve said … thoroughly inevitable. We would get out our AR-15s and shoot anyone who would prevent us from doing exactly the same.
However much we choose to close our eyes, hold our noses, or sooth or derange ourselves with the “white noise” of right-wing Faux/Fox News propaganda, we need to think about this: Our universally successful economic engine does and always has operated on motivated labor. Because of our decreasing birth rate and increasingly “entitled”, (read often parentally indulged) younger generation, we have fewer and fewer individuals willing to do the work which must be done to move that engine forward. Immigrants will, and always have been the key to our economic engine. And, if we do not accept, utilize, embrace and value them; it will be to our economic detriment and our moral devastation.

3. Guns – 60 years ago, we understood that the 2nd Amendment “may have” — emphasize “may” have — given us the right to keep and utilize hunting weapons for sport or to feed ourselves. We would have been dumbfounded if anyone had made the blatant assertion that we somehow had the right to carry any kind of weapon around without a permit, much less carry around a military weapon designed and constructed to kill human beings.
4. Abortion – Women have, throughout history been devalued, if not subjugated and sexually objectified. It’s just a fact. As a strongly religious person and Catholic, I consider the abortion/removal of a woman’s fetus prior to natural birth as a sin. But it’s absolutely, crystal clear that my religious belief matters not to any woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy for her and/or her family’s mental or physical health or well-being.
5. Gender issues/rights – It’s also crystal clear that gender, gender proclivity and gender related behavior has, throughout history, been displayed across an incredibly wide spectrum. While, depending on our proclivity, we may see a particular behavior as “unnatural” or somehow “deviant” or immoral, that spectrum is something that is natural as creation itself, and I’m convinced, as I am convinced by faith of the existence of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit, that these souls who embrace this behavior are simply Christ’s souls, to be loved, embraced and welcomed finally to his salvation.
6. Racism – On the other hand, if we as human beings think we are somehow better than our fellow human beings, whatever the excuse we are given, we are forever to be condemned to damnation.
7. Election rights/democracy – And, if we in any way embrace, excuse or obfuscate the complete and absolute right of all of our fellow human beings to fully determine the direction of their/our governance, at whatever level, we likewise should be, and will be condemned to damnation in the eyes of God.
In conclusion, pay attention. Be “woke.” Get your head out of the “mushroom” compost!

Jim Martin
Perryville