Sometime during the 14th century, people began wondering if the Black Plague was our fault and started whipping themselves. Of course, the Black Plague was our fault, but not for the reason they thought. It wasn’t so much that we were filthy on the inside, but that we were filthy on the outside.
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The Black Plague needed antibiotics, hand-washing, and public sanitation — things we weren’t quite ready for yet. What we were actually responsible for, the sloth and envy, rapes and murders, pride and gluttony, ungratefulness and ungodliness — these things we have always needed to repent of and never quite did. We had been deserving worse than the Black Plague forever, and we finally got it — and when we got it, we blamed things that had nothing to do with it.
But there are some times when something like the Flagellants is really genuinely helpful, and I think one of those cases is when you’re proving you’re not woke anymore. Because being woke is not a political position; it is a spiritual condition. And repenting of it isn’t just necessary to salvation; it is necessary to partake in civilization. Like communism, wokeness is so backward, so destructive, so tasteless, so joyless, so artless, so lacking in reason, so satanically deranged, that what we need to hear from leftists isn’t “Woke 1.0 was crazy.” We need such an irrefutable one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turnaround that nobody could possibly mistake them as infected. I mean kissing pictures of C.S. Lewis and Teddy Roosevelt and Steve Jobs and Ingrid Bergman — proof that they love real religion, discipline and masculinity, innovation and capitalism, and real white beauty. Hell, at this point I would even take a sincere conversion to Prosperity Gospel, or weightlifting.
Why? Because I have photo evidence that what they put us through requires either a baptism in water or a baptism by fire — that they are unfit for friendship, parties, weddings, countries, companies, schooling, parenting, publishing, modeling, filmmaking, engineering, gatekeeping, burger-flipping, and quinceañeras, bad for for love and a worse fit for life, and, barring repentance, should pretty much be locked out of everywhere but church. There we could possibly accept them, but only if they’re there to learn, and only if they say “sorry” before they get baptized. Otherwise, we’ll just have to kick them out. (In times like The Age of Faith, they would probably have been exorcised or burned as witches.)
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As such, here is the evidence: a garbage fire far bigger than Gehenna, a sewage stream more odious and toxic than the Cloaca Maxima, a monument of irrefutable cruelty and perversity and insanity, which I will forgive (when apologized to) but never forget, and which deserves our deep-seated, full-throated, fire-and-brimstone contempt.
What I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, is an album, almost a thousand pictures large, of The Woke Era.
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The Woke Era: A history in pictures
Image: JoslynLM via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.