February 21, 2025- “Woke” is worn out. So are “MAGA”,”DOGE”; and “Long live the king”. For that matter, “DEI” could use a vacation-as a slogan. Abraham Lincoln said “A house divided against itself cannot stand”. A country is like a house and for that matter, so is the human race.

Let’s look at the above-mentioned words and acronyms. Woke is the past tense of To Wake. It is also a term, taken from the Ebonics spoken by enslaved African-Americans and their descendants, to mean “aware of surroundings”,”paying attention”, and so on. That’s all it means and being “woke” does not, in and of itself, make one superior to all others. It just means that one is not easily fooled.

MAGA-“Make America Great Again”-catchy phrase, this-if one has been fooled into thinking that the change which this and other countries have been undergoing, in a time of global ferment, is somehow foreign to the human experience and thus should be resisted and counteracted. The United States of America has achieved several measures of greatness, precisely because of our diversity. White, male capital has needed the polyglot work force to bring its dreams into fruition. An educated work force is far more productive than a conglomerate of human oxen. This is one reason why Andrew Carnegie, no egalitarian by any means, nonetheless saw fit to relegate a hefty part of his fortune to a system of free public libraries, which became a model for such institutions the world over. The United States of America has never stopped being great. There is no “again”.

DOGE-“Department of Government Efficiency”: Here, we have taken our penchant for compartmentalizing aspects of our collective being to the next level. Efficiency, the good stewardship of what we are given, is somehow to be viewed as separate from every other element of our being. My parents, grandparents, parents-in-law- in short, everyone who survived the Depression, and before that, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Gilded Age, World War I, Influenza of 1918-must be spinning about, underground, to the extent that a 9.0 may be in the offing!

Every day of my formative years, I was told to count my dollars and cents, to know how much I earned per newspaper I delivered and to look about for further opportunities. I was taught to plan my day, each morning and to take stock of what had transpired, at day’s end. Efficiency has never been separate from any other aspect, of any enterprise that I have ever seen be successful. It falls to every entity to practice efficiency, in and of itself. We compartmentalize at our peril.

“Long live the king!”- That’s fine for Charles III or for Sultan, of Saudi Arabia. Kingship is their job. In a constitutional republic, kingship is a ludicrous proposition-even if the term is tossed out half in jest. No one man, or woman, can carry on alone. The above-mentioned monarchs know this-and thus, each has his Cabinet, his Prime Minister/Crown Prince, Parliament/Council of Elders. Only a lunatic actually believes in his own omnipotence. Shakespeare wrote King Lear, in reflecting on the reign of Henry VIII, for this very reason. No one of good will wishes death upon another person, but long life does not need to feature untrammeled obedience from one’s fellows.

DEI: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. When I was 17, I was taken aback, momentarily, by the sight of a person of colour in a small rural community in Massachusetts. Looking back, it is obvious how silly my reaction was. This planet has been a diverse community since Day One of living things. Sameness doesn’t exist in nature. It does exist in monoculture, to an extent, and we can see that monoculture ends up choking itself out of existence, in fairly short order.

Why, then, should we pursue either a forced uniformity or a contrived, artificial diversity? The former brought about the latter, true-but it is time to relegate both to the scrap heap, and let mature humans pursue their natural inclination towards diversity. This means allowing all who seek to join in a given activity or enterprise, the chance to take part. Inclusion is a natural process, not a feature of statute, to be enforced by fiat.

Equity? When my parents were raising us, my youngest brother needed things that the rest of us did not He was given what he needed, to the best of our parents’ ability to provide. I did not begrudge him this. He, in turn, was not given driving lessons, or expected to get a part-time job, in his teen years. Opening the way for a human being to meet individual or small group needs is not discrimination against all others. Helping People of Colour to overcome, in specific ways, the effects of institutionalized bias is not a travesty. It is true that none of us alive today are responsible for establishing elements of bias. Why, then, do we act like we have such vested interest in them?

DEI, as doctrine, should not even be necessary. Nor should MAGA, or DOGE, or rule by fiat. In this day, each of us is responsible for living an integrated, well-balanced life. Why, then, do we choose to compartmentalize?