Temporarily woke
I hate hypocrisy. It feels like, if you claim something, you must believe in it. And if you truly believe in it, you don’t switch stands. If I strongly believe in equality for women, objective equality, I have believed in it forever and I stand by it and for it always. But the truth is, I haven’t.
I haven’t always been the person I am, with the views I have today. Five years down the line, hell, five days down the line I might not be the same person I am right this instant. When I was young, I lived an absolutely carefree life without much thought given to the idea of right and wrong, the concept of compassion, and I never questioned the world around me. It was as it was and I was here to walk my path. As I grew older, though, especially now in my twenties, I find it more invigorating to question everything. To question the concept and reality of everything from religion, to sexuality, to hierarchy, to politics, to gender roles, to my own consciousness, to question everything from something as seemingly insignificant as a mosquito to something as large and imposing as landfills.
And so from my Instagram and other social media I slowly unfollow pages that provide mindless entertainment and follow pages and channels that provide information about things ranging from Egyptian mummies to quantum entanglement, about farmers protests and Black Lives Matter. Recently, I have become deeply involved with the issue of climate change, and the amount of waste we generate on a daily basis. I throw out a plastic bag of trash every ten days, full of other plastic bags, some take-away containers, fruit and vegetable remains, and other everyday use stuff. If I think about it, that makes 37 bags a year, generated by two people. A thousand people live in my housing society, making it 18,500 bags generated a year only by my housing society. And so these thoughts have been penetrating through my head finally, making me realize how much I end up contributing every time I ask for a ketchup packet, every time I pick out a plastic bag at the grocery store. Lately I have begun to condemn my family for leaving electrical switches on, for wasting paper or tissues or any such single-use items.
Today I watched a video of a guy putting on make-up, which sadly makes me feel woke. He did a really good job of it, and even if he didn’t, no one should feel it their right to say anything to him or judge him in any way because a person’s own body is entirely their own choice. Later, we were watching TV and one of my family members innocuously commented on the amount of make-up a guy was wearing. This started a train of thoughts in my head about how these are the kind of comments that cause men to be insecure about their choices, and end up creating toxic masculinity. And yet if I think about it absolutely honestly, I haven’t steered very clear of such innocent comments either. It’s not easy to adapt so quickly to a world which is becoming more woke by the second.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying “oh it’s so difficult to talk about stuff anymore, it seems like anything can end up offending anyone”. It is truly something to be proud of that we are moving towards a world where everyone can be comfortable expressing themselves completely, without fear of judgement and with hope of compassion. But I, personally, have grown up in a world which hadn’t fully encouraged this acceptance, and my mind defaults to its original values of ‘a guy putting on makeup’ striking more strongly than ‘a girl putting on makeup’. The human mind is fickle, and what I feel woke about today because I watched a 20-minute documentary on it, may take a back-seat when something else dominates my mind. And so while hypocrisy in this sense cannot be fully avoided, I guess all I hope is to keep the spirit of questioning everything every moment of every day, and maybe by doing so I can override my brain’s default values and move towards a more permanent-state of being woke.
