Can't remember exactly when I got woke to wokeness. I think I had a pretty good handle on the phenomenon when I wrote this.
That was two years ago. Things aren't getting any better.
On the one hand, we pretend we want to build resilience in our young people. But God forbid that if, somewhere along life's journey, somebody calls you a bad word...
Nowadays, that's your ticket to 15 minutes of fame on the CBC. And society will excuse you if you're suffering from PTSD the next twenty years.
Well, by all means, let that collapse your universe. Being called a bad word used to be considered part of the cut and thrust of everyday life. Every ethnic group had "bad words" for every other ethnic group. I remember those times. I was one of them foreigners who got off the boat without a word of English.
I learned about the Bohunks and the Kikes and the rest of us soon enough. Those bad words figured large in my introduction to the English language.
We all survived...
We became Canadians. Just like Sikhs and Syrians and Afghans and Nigerians are doing today.
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