Thought for the day –The opposite of ‘woke’ is ‘asleep’.

It’s an age old trick of extremists. First you find a word or phrase that sums up the ideas and principles you don’t like (or that don’t suit your agenda). A word like, for instance ‘woke’. Then you repeatedly lie about, and misrepresent what it means, until it becomes accepted by the populace as a pejorative term – a bad thing. In time, the term (along with all the good sentiments it represents), can’t be uttered without evoking disapprobation.

Perhaps the best way to counter such nefarious propaganda is to fight like with like. So welcome to the launch (will it fly?) of…

Sleep Culture!

Because the opposite of ‘woke’ is not ‘sensible’, but ‘asleep’. Which is exactly what the ordinary folk who have been hoodwinked into believing the right-wing rhetoric are. All the way back in the eighties, with my first (and only) band, we had a song called Sleeptalk, with lyrics written by our very talented singer and co-writer Nigel…

They drug you up just to keep you down,
Send us to sleep so their system is sound,
They’re sending us to sleep./…

We’re lulled to believe their tranquil lies,
Too drowsy to open our eyes;
They’re sending us to sleep.

That was during the bad old days of Margaret Thatcher [1.], the architect of Britain’s ‘selfish society’. Today, Nigel’s lyric is more relevant than ever, as the general population is lulled into inactivity by Sleep Culture.

No wonder the Fascistic right wingers hate all things ‘woke’. They’ve been keeping us sedated – ‘asleep’ – for so long. The last thing they want is for us to be ‘woke’ to all the injustice, the discrimination, the oppression and the withholding of human rights we’ve been subjected to for so long. So they take control of ever more of the media, double down on their propaganda, keep us distracted with facile TV, video games, and ever more sporting competitions, so we don’t pay attention to what’s happening all around us. Sending us to sleep, so their (unfair) system is sound.

We need to wake up and kick back against this Sleep Culture. When much of the free world is on the cusp of slipping back into autocracy, there’s no time to lose. The last line of Sleeptalk pre-empts, and could almost be seen as a definition for, ‘woke’:

I open my eyes and I laugh at the shit and the lies the bastards fed me! [2.]

So in future, whenever you see the term ‘woke’ being used as a pejorative, if there’s an opportunity to reply (on social media for instance), why not hit back by denouncing their disingenuous narrative as Sleep Culture?

‘Woke’? Some of us ain’t never been asleep!

[1.] Ding dong, the witch is dead!
[2.] Apologies for the cussing!
[3.] Apologies for the quality of the sketch – I’ll hold fire on that application for the post of political cartoonist for the time being.