Two mornings ago, my first order of the day was to complete this column. I awoke, as most of you did, to a fresh blanket of snow. It was an inescapable reminder that my 10-day birthday celebration in the sun in Naples, Florida was a thing of the past. My time in the sun was an inescapable reminder of how it felt to be in a red state vs. a blue state. How it felt to be in a “What?” state vs. a “Woke” state back here in Massachusetts.

“Awoke” minus the “A” is the key word here. My time in Florida with my sister at our brother’s home provided a brief immersion into the hometown of “wokeness.” Question: if you are not “woke,” are you “blind?”

Russ Vought, a veteran House Republican aide, conservative activist and Trump administration staffer, has put together a budget proposal for the GOP entitled “A Commitment to End Woke and Weaponized Government.” He is selling conservatives and aspiring authoritarians the fantasy that they can achieve a “balanced budget” without cutting anything “popular” by “ending woke.” Vought, according to the Washington Post, says that “lawmakers can wipe out $9 trillion in federal spending over the next decade. This must include the impact of Trump’s tax cuts, especially the sharp reduction in the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35% that took a big bite out of federal revenue. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2018 that the tax cut would increase deficits by about $1.9 trillion over 11 years.

Vought’s “Commitment to End Woke” budget would include “$2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, the health programs for the poor; more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act; more than $400 billion in cuts to food stamps; hundreds of billions of dollars to educational subsidies; and halving the State Department and Labor Department, among other federal agencies.”

This past Monday, Florida Gov. Rod DeSantis took his anti-woke agenda to Staten Island, the first of a three-state tour of blue cities. Led by the GOP’s second place contender (pretender?) for president after former, twice-impeached president Donald Trump, this war against wokeness is, in reality, a war against freedom and equality. Florida’s problem promises to become an American problem. “DeSantis,” reports MSNBC News, “is determined to stamp out intellectual freedom, and it’s causing other red states to scrutinize AP Black studies. He’s also threatening to withdraw state support for Advanced Placement courses altogether.”

The Miami Herald reported that “top Florida officials are exploring alternatives to the College Board, meeting with the founder of an exam called the Classic Learning Test.” Supporters of the exam say it focuses on the “classical and Christian tradition” and the “centrality of the Western tradition.”

Two days ago, The New York Times wrote that “DeSantis delights in confronting liberals, and not just about Covid. He has flown migrants to Massachusetts to protest President Biden’s immigration policy. “Florida is where woke goes to die,” DeSantis has said, summarizing the fights he has picked on medical care for transgender youth and on racial issues.” NYT reporter Michael Bender, who is covering the Republican field, says DeSantis’s appeal right now “is that he is perceived as both a fighter for conservative causes and a winner.”

I think any clear-thinking person has to conclude that DeSantis is using “woke” to mean any notion that brown, Black, LGBTQ people and women are “citizens” rather than “subjects,” who, whether they live in red states or blue, would have no seat at the table. In his “American dream,” they would be forced to shut up and do, think, read and say only what Ron DeSantis tells them to. American politics has gone from right and left to left and wrong.

An even grimmer cloud darkening democracy is the silent “approval” that all but a fraction today’s GOP are providing to fuel its “woke” conquest of American democracy.

In his book, “When Veins Ignite: Either Integration or Degradation,” AbhijitNaskar writes, “Woke and cancel culture are both signs of a judgmental culture, not a mentally mature one. A world where you cannot even speak to another person without worrying about what they are going to think of you, has not advanced much from the days when the white people used to own slaves. Let me tell you this, if you are kind, if you are compassionate, if you hold no discrimination towards people whatsoever, then you have no reason to worry about whether you are woke enough.”

John Bos grew up in the Midwest in the 1950s, a decade marked by the post-World War II boom and the dawn of the Cold War. However, the nascent civil rights movement and the McCarthy crusade against communism at home and abroad in the Korean War exposed underlying divisions in American society. He’s been trying to connect those dots of division ever since. Questions and comments are always welcome at john01370@gmail.com.

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