Ron Ghitter, a former MLA, co-founder of Dignity Forum, and a member of the Calgarians for the Common Good, shared an op-ed in the Calgary Herald the other month. Below is a copy of the printed editorial, detailing his thoughts on the word 'woke,' and how we're continuing the conversation on bettering our community, city and country. Please read it below.

___

Over the past few years, we have experienced a lexicon of new words and phrases that lack a familiarity to my generation (those over 75 years) but that have many implications. To some, it raises many controversial issues.

We are bombarded with descriptive words and phrases, such as; cancel culture, replacement theories, intersectionality, white fragility and woke. What are the messages advanced by these words?

Let’s deal with the often used and misunderstood word “woke”. One may be woke or anti-woke but what does that imply and do we truly understand the impact of this word?

Woke is defined as being alert, informed, educated and conscious of social injustice, discrimination and racism. It advocates awareness of our society’s past sins committed against our Indigenous peoples, our Holocaust victims, our Black and Brown populations and members of our Asian communities. It is a social justice ideology that harbours diversity, fairness and acceptance as its creed and includes a deep respect and understanding of our true history.

As Winston Churchill and others have warned, “Those who fail to learn from our history are doomed to repeat it.”

Still, there are those who espouse anti-woke theories. They contend that we are not responsible for the sins of our past and that to educate our youth of the tragedies of our past will be unsettling, troublesome and will make them uncomfortable.

They argue that we should forget about the Holocaust, forget about the residential schools, forget about treatment imposed upon our Indigenous and Black populations and ignore the impact of Islamophobia and the abuses experienced by our Asian and LGBTQ2S+ communities.They submit that mandatory vaccinations during the pandemic were an intrusion upon their freedoms.

They would ban books from our curriculum (as today in Florida and elsewhere) and remove from our schools the writings of such extraordinary authors as Mark Twain, Margaret Atwood, Ernest Hemingway, Tony Morrison, George Orwell, Harper Lee and many others. They would remove from our schools’ curricula any references to racism, prejudice, bigotry, genocide and discrimination. They want to erase race-related content.

They tell us that to be woke is to be on the extreme left, a form of cultural Marxism. They tell us that wokers want to interfere with our lives and how we think.

In fact, it is the anti-wokers who want to avoid critical thinking, to control what we think, to dictate what we should forget and to determine what should be taught in schools. It has become the politicization of the culture wars. We must never forget our history, both the good and the bad. Knowledge is based upon our understanding of who we are and what we were.

The Dignity Forum, with its partners from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights in Edmonton, the Alberta Human Rights Commission and Action Dignity in Calgary is dedicated to actively encourage education in the schools about human rights. The goal is to help our youth in developing an understanding of the past, of the present indignities faced by our marginalized citizens and the tragic consequences of such prejudice and discrimination.

If these activities mean being “woke”, I am willing to take part in it and take on the anti-wokers.