First of all, I’m woke and I’m proud. To me, being woke means being awake to the experiences of others, in the present and the past, and having empathy for how those experiences have affected them. I’m happy to say that I have never been a slave, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to understand that being owned and held captive to the whims of another human being is not a good thing.

Why, then, is the MAGA crowd so in love with the Confederacy, whose only reason for being was to protect the obscene institution of slavery so that the white owners could continue to profit over the forced labor of their Black slaves?

The most recent sign of this peculiar MAGA obsession is Pete Hegseth’s order to reinstall a statue that honors the Confederacy in Arlington Cemetery (Stars and Stripes). A joint commission of Congress decided that the statue should be removed in 2023 because it presented “highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” Hegseth plans to spend $10 million to put it back in place as a rebuke to “woke lemmings” who want to erase history, while Hegseth and his MAGA mob want to “honor” it.

Honor slavery?! What am I missing here? Does making America great again mean that we should reinstitute slavery? Should the descendants of freed slaves be forced back into bondage, put under the control of the descendants of former slave owners? And that will make America great? Maybe I should just go back to sleep, and, please, don’t anyone wake me.