An offensive opinion column in The Hill ran across my news feed yesterday, “Plain truths don’t matter to the woke folks who now rule America”. Please don’t look for it, I’ll give you the gist and would rather they get less traffic. The claim is that we are so “woke” that we won’t speak the “plain truth,” as if the author has a corner on truth (Bernard Goldberg, whose name I will otherwise not repeat because he hasn’t earned any respect, but some of you may be familiar with his writing). But what is “woke” and why are right-wing types always insisting that’s a bad thing? Per Merriam Webster, in addition to having become awake, it is slang for: “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)”. I would much rather be woke than asleep to important issues, have been reading here about justice issues for years, and am proud to be woke! I hope you are too. I reject “woke” as an insult!
Specifically, the author refers back to the incident when “In April [of this year], a 7-year old Black girl was shot and killed while sitting in a car with her father at a McDonald’s drive-thru in Chicago.” Say her name — Jaslyn Adams. Shortly before that, also in Chicago, a young Latino boy was shot and killed when running away from police, then as ordered turning around and putting his hands up (the moving hands causing the idiot cop to think he was going to get shot). Say his name — Adam Toledo. You may recall that the CEO of McD’s then “sent a text message to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot that recently was made public, in which he said that the shootings were ‘tragic’. Then he added: ‘With both, the parents failed those kids.’” Ugh! You probably also recall that the CEO later apologized repeatedly. In one of those apologies, he said “I have not walked in the shoes of [those children’s families] and so many others who are facing a very different reality. Not taking the time to think about this from their viewpoint was wrong.” You can judge for yourself whether or not you think that’s sufficient apology. The author of this op-ed, however, thinks he should not have apologised and was just stating an “inconvenient truth,” but he felt the need to apologise because we’re all “woke”. Even more Ugh!
First of all, regardless of facts, who with any heart at all tells grieving parents that they are partly responsible for their children’s deaths??? There’s a special place in Hell for someone who would do that, if there is a Hell. Secondly, this sounds very much like a CEO trying to avoid any blame placed on McDonald’s for the murder, and it likely had some (did they know this as a high-crime area, did they provide barriers so people can’t shoot into the drive-through line and/or an escape lane so people can get away from the drive-through line?). Now that his comments have come out, he probably bought himself a bigger lawsuit, but that’s not going to be much solace to grieving parents.
Thirdly, Marion Lewis was arrested in the Jaslyn Adams case for "18 felony charges, including first-degree murder, first-degree attempted murder, vehicular hijacking and aggravated discharge of a firearm”. Sure, maybe Ms. Adams’ father had a criminal record. Does that mean he should never be around his children? Is he supposed to be a mind reader, that someone would shoot at him with his very young daughter with him? Let’s hope Lewis’ attorney doesn’t try this as a defense.
Fourthly, it looks like Eric Stillman, the police killer of Adam Toledo, may escape justice, although the DOJ has been asked to investigate (I don’t like to use Wiki as a source, but couldn’t find the whole story elsewhere). But Chicago is already under a consent decree with the DOJ and is reviewing its foot pursuit policies because of the 13-year-old boy’s death. Does that look like a general feeling that it’s the parents’ fault?
Fifthly, there is a glaring systemic issue: I don’t know why Mr. Toledo was out in the middle of the night. Maybe as a young teen he was trusted to stay home alone whilst parents worked, maybe he had permission to go out with friends, maybe he left his house without permission; but he’s a kid and we’ve all escaped our parents’ supervision in our youth without deadly consequences. But if the right wing really wants parents to have the ability to constantly supervise their children, there is one really excellent way for this to happen: Pay as a minimum a living wage! Make any, say, 30-or-more-hour-per-week job pay enough for that one person to raise a family of four or more, so that the other parent can stay home with the children. That’s partly how wages used to be determined. Better yet, pay for caretaking, including that of one’s own children! We have been unpaid for domestic duties of all kinds for far too long, and children and the sick and/or elderly and/or disabled suffer for having to fend for themselves far too much of the time. It has become economically unfeasible for most families to stay home with their children; many even have multiple parents working multiple jobs to earn a basic decent living. The value of unpaid care to other adults alone in the US was estimated in 2019 as $470 billion per year. The value of unpaid care of children would surely be in the trillions annually. So the right wing doesn’t want teens out on their own figuring out what to do, where to go, who to hang with? Then make it financially feasible for parents to have the time to spend with their kids. But of course, this obvious answer will never seem agreeable to the right wing for something-something-socialism “reasons”! The real reasons, of course, being classism, racism and sexism!
My apologies for the long rant. But The Hill’s opinion author had a rather long op-ed to which I felt a need to reply.
