If it Ain’t Woke, Don’t Fix it

Much has happened since I last visited a column of my unfiltered thoughts upon the good people of this town.

A fierce snowstorm blanketed our unsuspecting Dominion, seeking and destroying house pipes with surgical precision. Our Prime Minister took a much-needed break from surfing in stormy Tofino, to luxuriate instead in the clear-blue waters of the Caribbean. And a major victory for immigration restriction was won, as Ottawa was dragged kicking and screaming into a long overdue crackdown on international student numbers.

One of the most significant developments in Canada over the last few years has been the beginning of an anti-woke backlash. Across the Western world, disgruntled majorities have begun to hold their own in the previously one-sided culture war the radical Left has waged for decades with impunity. The silent majority in Canada has now joined the fray.

In the syndicated columns of newspapers, and the conversations of ordinary people, a long pent-up frustration against the rigid orthodoxies of the far Left is voiced with growing frequency and openness.

How do the politically correct lot respond to the trampling of their dogmas, the daily disparaging of their sacred tenets, by the unwashed masses? By countering the challenge to their worldview with well-formulated arguments? Far from it!

In a strategic decision that confounds reason, adherents of woke ideology have intensified their puritanical struggle, using their dominance of institutions to fanatically pursue their project of socially engineering society. Their latest target is one of their favourites: books.

The Toronto Catholic school board has prohibited the teaching of books which contain certain racial slurs, for fear of offending students with immigrant backgrounds. This ban will encompass much of the great literature of the 19^th and early 20^th century – those tomes with the well-deserved title of “literary classics”.

Tossed in the bonfire will be the works of John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh, and Joseph Conrad. Gone With The Wind will also burn, with its honest and heartrending account of the Civil War, and its sympathetic and nuanced treatment of non-white characters. Woke school boards probably never attempt to read its 984 pages.

In its Kamikaze assault on the Great Books, the woke Left does not consider the group hurt most: students.

Immigrant students are deprived of the opportunity to assimilate into our civilization by studying the timeless Western Canon, while native-born students are deprived of learning their own culture.

All students are deprived of the chance to be uplifted beyond the mind-numbing metaverse of TikTok and Netflix. And Lord knows what woke drivel will be assigned in place of the literary classics! A single page of a Bronte novel contains more insight into the human condition than all the social justice tracts of the 21^st century.

As cancel culture loses its grip, the time is ripe to dislodge the fringe woke minority from Canadian institutions, and send them back to the race and gender studies departments. Then, let’s defund those departments.

Editor’s note: My bi-monthly Counter Current column is originally published in Salt Spring’s Islands Marketplace paper (islandsmarketplace.com/issue.pdf). This piece was published on January 26th, 2024.