It all started with T-Ball.
Stay with me here, I think I may be on to something.
And as our alleged President says, “No joke. You think I’m kidding. I’m not.
If you track how we got to where we are today, it can all be traced back to the T-Ball fields spread across the fruited plains of America and spread like creeping black mold from there.
The current iteration of woke is a predictable evolution of the "everybody gets a trophy" equity ethos that began back in the late 80's/early 90's at the T-Ball level, the purpose of which was to protect kids from disappointment and hurt feelings that they weren't mature enough to handle, most of which were encountered in games and other elective competitive situations.
Parents who could not accept that their kid wasn't going to be the next Aaron Judge, Tiger Woods or Williams sister wanted a way to avoid the social stigma of having their own future theoretical physicist on the team but the expansion of after school programs of every description served to expand all the things open to parents to find out how bad their little bundles of joy sucked at most, if not all, of them.
And that served to increase the desire to protect the kids from disappointment and themselves from embarrassment.
It then migrated from the sports fields and courts to the classroom where it was "unfair" when some kids did better than others and advanced from objective grades, to grading on a curve, to pass/fail grades, to not giving grades at all.
And from there it moved into the market and boardrooms where companies were graded on social scores rather than meeting performance objectives, ignoring that the sole purpose for a business is to make a profit.
It then crossed over into the entire the adult world in the form of wokeism, the attempt to shield everyone - except the unfavored class - from the same disappointments experienced on the T-Ball fields of yore.
Within the past couple of years, it has jumped from wokeism, which was generally about behaviors, mores, traditions, and history to a virulent form of racialism where certain classes must be protected from white society generated T-Ball embarrassments and lack of performance that was solely due to the color of their skin. The most important thing about you was your race.
Now we are in the final stages. Racialism lost its spot on the tip of the grievance pyramid to been sexual identarianism, an ideology that rejects physical reality and presupposes you can change the unchangeable. Now people can choose to “identify” as pretty much anything other than the biological sexual binary, male or female.
All it has done is to create generations of people who can’t handle life because the lessons of competition have been denied them. They actually believe having to compete with their ideas against the ideas of others is not how things work. They seek to punish anyone who doesn’t agree with them because they can’t comprehend that they might not be the smartest or the best in the room.
T-Ball.
The main difference between now and the 80’s is that today's T-Ball games have real consequences.
I recently wrote a similar article Michael, but I put the onus upon Fun Fair Positive Soccer - not tee ball. Same concept though - everyone gets to play, everyone gets equal time, they don't keep score, only positive coaching and comments, and everyone gets a trophy. I have affectionately aliased FFPS, "Communist Kickball" (though I suppose if it was truly "communist," no one would get a trophy, and government would be the only winner).
And now....it has progressed. Pickleball! For non athlete Boomers.