Dispatch 003-Woke

Such a tiny word.
Four letters. One syllable.
The linguistic equivalent of a carry-on bag.

As kids, we understood it perfectly.
Woke meant you stopped sleeping. That was it.
You woke up. You brushed your teeth. You went outside.

No press conferences.
No cable news panels.
No emergency legislation.

“She woke up feeling better.”
End of story. Juice box. Recess.

Somewhere between nap time and
prime time, though, woke mutated.
It evolved from a harmless past-tense verb
into a full-blown cultural supervillain.

A word that can apparently destroy empires,
ruin breakfast cereals, and single-handedly
topple Western Civilization before lunch.

Impressive for four letters.

Now woke doesn’t mean you opened your eyes.
It means you noticed something. You noticed
injustice. You noticed inequality. You noticed
that maybe, just maybe, other people’s
experiences are real, even if they aren’t yours.
And that, apparently, is where things got controversial.

When did “being aware” become a threat?
When did “paying attention” become partisan?

We don’t accuse smoke alarms of being
”too woke” for noticing fire. We don’t tell
seatbelts to calm down about car crashes.
But suggest we should be alert to injustice,
systemic, historical, ongoing, and suddenly
the word itself is the emergency.

Maybe the discomfort isn’t about the word.
Maybe it’s about what waking up requires.
Because waking up is inconvenient. It
interrupts dreams. It demands movement.
It asks you to sit up, look around, and
admit the room isn’t arranged the way
you thought it was.

And yes, sometimes being awake is exhausting.
Especially when the alarm keeps ringing.

But what’s the alternative?
Collective snoozing? A national nap?
Hitting “dismiss” on history and
hoping it resolves itself?

We are all subjected to injustice in different
ways. We are all implicated to systems
bigger than us. We are all connected,
tightly, messily, inconveniently connected.

The air we breathe, the laws we pass,
the stories we tell, the silence we keep,
none of it exists in isolation. Every action,
generous or harmful, ripples outward.

That’s not “woke.”
That’s gravity.

So maybe the real question isn’t why
the word got complicated. Maybe it’s
why we’re so offended by consciousness.
Why awareness feels heavier than ignorance.
Why empathy gets rebranded as extremism.

For a project called: What We Carry:
Effigies for the Weight of Humanity
(Yes, It’s a Lot, We Know), perhaps
woke is less a slogan and more a burden.
A weight we carry once we see clearly.

You can’t unsee what you’ve seen.
You can’t unknow what you know.
Once you’re awake, you’re awake.

And if that’s controversial, well.
Maybe the problem isn’t the word.
Maybe it’s the alarm clock.