The Daily Star, Oneonta, N.Y., Robert Cairns column

Feb. 03--I'm going to show my age here. Bear with me.

The word "woke" has always been a verb, in my experience, the past tense of "wake." To use it in a phrase, for example, "You woke me up. Go away."

Lately, however, "woke" has become an adjective. People are described as "woke" when they are aware, especially politically aware. Urbandictionary.com says, "Being Woke means being aware ... Knowing what's going on in the community." It's not hard to trace the etymology that led from one use to the other.

It's fair to say, in the wake of Donald Trump's ascendancy to the presidency, that America is woke.

The largest example is the Jan. 21 Women's March on Washington, which drew a half-million women to the nation's capital to protest the priorities of the new regime and drew at least hundreds of thousands more to marches and demonstrations in cities and towns around the world, including hundreds here in our area. Women who have not been politically active made it very clear that they oppose the expected reversals of gains made in equal pay for equal work, LGBTQ rights and that hottest of hot-button issues, reproductive rights.

The crowd on the National Mall was likely bigger than that of Trump's inauguration the previous day, though the president and his supporters won't admit that.

Women are woke.

Lots of people became woke (got woke? were woke?) when Trump signed the executive order that severely restricts immigration from seven Muslim countries, suspends refugee admission for 120 days, and bars Syrian refugees indefinitely.

Huge protests popped up at U.S. airports and on college campuses. It might seem predictable that college students, full of idealism and ensconced on campuses that are seen by many as bastions of liberalism, would organize in opposition to what looks like discrimination. But it might have caught Trump and his supporters off-guard when criticism of the action was expressed by world leaders such as British Prime Minister Theresa May and the Vatican. Several Republican members of the U.S. Congress and even the conservative activist Koch Brothers joined in.

A powerful rebuke came from Marie Tillman, wife of Pat Tillman, a National Football League star who famously turned his back on the NFL to enlist in the Army in 2002 and was killed in 2004 in combat in Afghanistan. "This is not the country he dreamed of, not what he served for and not what he died for," Marie Tillman said, in a Facebook message.

Those people are all woke.

We're bound to see more "waking" in response to Trump's nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Gorsuch praised the polarizing Antonin Scalia during the announcement of his nomination. Gorsuch's conservative record will endear him to some and have the opposite effect on others. His nomination was going to be controversial in any event after Republicans blocked the nomination of Barack Obama's nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, for nearly a year. A lot of Democrats want payback.

People on both sides of that deal will be woke.

My favorite group of newly awakened people are the professionals who work in federal agencies and have chosen to circumvent Trump's attempt to quash information with gag orders.

Trump's ego was clearly pierced when the National Park Service released a photo that showed the crowd at his inauguration was a fraction of the size of the crowd that turned out for Obama in 2009, so he banned the agency from releasing any more photos.

Similarly, the federal EPA and NASA were ordered not to release information in support of climate change. The political arm of the White House would decide which scientific facts we citizens are allowed to know.

Brilliantly and hilariously, those scientists did not take that lying down. Instead, they launched alternative Twitter accounts, beyond the control of Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, to tell us the inconvenient truths the administration does not want us to know.

"Alt" accounts for the Centers for Disease Control, the FDA, the National Instititutes for Health, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, several national parks and more have appeared in recent weeks. It's a wonderful act of civil disobedience and worth our time to do a web search and see what they're up to.

The fact that a middle-aged, rural, white guy has discovered "woke" probably means that the young, urban and hip have moved on to something else. I will, nonetheless, enjoy seeing civil engagement and wonder if it can be maintained through the 2018 midterm elections and the presidential race two years later.

I hope so. I'm woke.

Robert Cairns is the sections editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at [email protected] or (607) 441-7217.

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