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Nigel Farage says Australia is “the wokest place on earth”.
According to the official dictionary meaning of “woke”, Nigel is saying our country is leading the world in being “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues”. I’m pretty sure this is not what Nige meant.
The official definition also tells us “woke” describes someone who has “woken up” to issues of social injustice.
Neither of these traits seems to be too bad to me. However, as we see daily, “woke” is used by many, especially those on the right of politics, as a disparaging or derogatory term.
Although Farage didn’t spell out in detail why he thought Australia should be singled out for its attention to important facts and issues, it came during a particularly feisty rant at a US conservative conference where he was railing against COVID lockdowns.
At the same conference, former US President Donald Trump said he could end the Russia/Ukraine war in one day. He didn’t say how, but he did seem very annoyed that his country was providing a lot of financial support to Ukraine. I’m no military strategist, but if the Donald plans to cut off aid to Ukraine, there’s a fair chance the war will end pretty quickly. Just not sure that’s the result the rest of the world would want.
But back to Australia and its wokeness standing.
Farage felt the world had been conned into closing down during the pandemic. Joining the dots, he suggested the countries that closed down excessively were too woke.
And as we know, here in Australia, we did a lot of locking down for a very long time. Those days of lockdowns are thankfully now behind us, but unfortunately, the human cost will continue to be felt for a long time yet.
In the UK this week, schoolteachers are documenting the long-term damage COVID lockdowns have caused pupils of all ages, from pre-school right through to university. They’re talking about a lost generation with no social or learning skills.
Kids couldn’t concentrate any more, they couldn’t write and they had forgotten how to read. They had lost their social skills, and their maths was deplorable. In secondary school children, there was a dramatic increase in students self-harming.
A university professor told how students returned after lockdowns as a shell of their former selves. They were withdrawn and hunkered down.
“The end result of all this was a COVID generation who were eerily quiet, silent almost, and who often appeared to shun socialising and interacting with others,” the professor said.
Have no doubt, there will be a similar cost here in Australia. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but one wonders the price we will pay for keeping kids, the least vulnerable to COVID, out of classrooms.
In Canberra, there was certainly no urgency to get kids back into classrooms. And unfortunately, when they finally did, teacher shortages meant lots of kids still had to stay home.
Whatever the true meaning of being “woke” is today, we can only hope that Australia being the wokest of all won’t condemn a generation of our children to the wilderness.
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