C. Graham Campbell, Ph.D. was born in Canada and immigrated to this country with his parents at the age of three. He is a seventy-five-year-old retired psychologist and a late blossoming author. He has a master’s degree in theology, a doctorate in pastoral psychology and training in Spiritual Psychology. He now spends most of his time involved with family, writing, meditating, and exploring what being an elder means. His work has appeared in Ravens Perch, Bicopa, Braided Way, and Steel Jack Daw, among others.
Massachusetts Where “Woke” Comes to Live: 10 reasons to live here
Massachusetts where it all began. Never has so much resulted from a little tea party and a midnight ride.
What is really important now is that Massachusetts is where ‘Woke’ culture comes to LIVE.
1. If you like being woke and you come here, you don’t have to die. We love woke and are proud of it. We were the only state that voted for George McGovern in 1972 and our freak flag still flies. As long as you support everyone’s rights along with your own, the door is open. We, in the woke world, are about inclusiveness for all our people.
2. You can be transgender here and use whatever bathroom feels right. Sometimes it’s a little awkward but it gets figured out. No one will report you for child abuse if you make sure your transgender child receives the best possible medical care. And the governor will never require your child’s medical records be sent to his or her office. If transgender people are only one-half percent (0.05%) of the population in the United States, there are approximately 160,000 transgender people in our country and 3,000 per state. We care about ours.
3. LGBTQIA flags are welcome as are the people it proudly represents. We currently have the first openly lesbian governor in the country. In this state you don’t have to be white, male, and straight to be successful. One of the strengths of Massachusetts is that we can learn from things not recognized in the 1950s. So, we have gone from denying there were closets, let alone people in them, to opening the doors and inviting everyone into the fresh air just as we have gone from smoking everywhere in the 1960s to not smoking in public places now.
4. Gay marriage has been legal here since 2004. The divorce rate in Massachusetts is relatively low thus disproving the old trope that gay anything leads to destruction of straight families. Straight families, and families with two daddies or two mommies are working quite well. It just took a while for some straight people to wake up to that possibility.
5. We have comparatively strict gun laws. We protect our children more than anyone’s guns. And you can be assured that the state government does not want your guns. Mostly, it wouldn’t know what to do with them. We don’t trust politicians who want everyone’s gun any more than we trust them interfering with health care. It is clear that more guns mean more homicides. You are far more likely to be killed by a gun toting neighbor or family member than a criminal. In addition, who needs and assault rifle to kill Bambi or Thumper?
6. Women do well in Massachusetts. Our governor, as mentioned above, is a woman. And one of our senators is a woman who persists (a word she was once maligned with on the Senate Floor) in doing the people’s work. In addition, five of six elected statewide officials are women. The mayor of Boston, our state capital, is a woman. There are sixty-two women in the state legislature which has two hundred seats. That is only thirty-one percent but is higher than in the past. Women in this state are still in charge of their own bodies and medical decisions. They make medical decisions with a team of medical professionals and, when appropriate, family members. We have world class health care here in part because politicians stay out of it. Women make their own decisions, and no government departments track their travel across state lines.
7. We don’t ban books here. If a parent is worried about what books their child is reading, we expect the parent to talk about it with their child, not decide what other people’s children can read. Many of us are proud when our kids step out of the box of social conformity, stretch their minds, and learn new ways to think.
8. We have schools that are learning to welcome diversity in race, gender, country of origin and immigration status. After a rocky start in Boston during the 1970s, we mostly got on track. We also care for our kids who are plagued with learning variabilities, not as well as some people wish, but better than in the past. Not only does woke culture live here but it gets well educated. Our approach to American History is facing the truth. We support our children in confronting the realities of slavery and segregation. After all, if German children can learn about the Holocaust, then American children can learn about slavery. Unless for some unknown reason, American children are more delicate and fragile than children from the rest of the world.
9. We are not a haven for flat earthers, vaccine refusers and covid deniers. Like every state we have our share of ‘wingnuts’ but mostly we wore masks when appropriate. We accepted the inconvenience to protect one another although most of us agree, “masks suck.” Even if you are a bit daffy but don’t try to shove your version of American Mythology on to others we can get along. There are lots of kinds of diversity here as evidenced by the fact that seven of the last ten governors have been Republican. Most recently Charlie Baker, a Republican, was seen as one of the most popular governors in America. But the local Republicans chased him out of town because he wasn’t a Trump toady. We would even make room for James Carville, the mostly ‘has been’ Democratic strategist who criticized woke culture as a liability.
10. Weed has been legal here for several years. Disproving another old trope that it is a ‘gateway’ drug. Sales have sky-rocketed among middle class buyers who no longer need to find a seedy dealer in a dark alley.
So, if you want to live woke, come join us.
From the Editor:
We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.
Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 8
64 pages, published 4/16/2024
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