Burgs’ Woke
The United States of America renews this June 21, 2025, its now ritualistic sacrifice of young Americans to Middle Eastern War. This time there can be no mistaking either the reason for, or the inevitability of that sacrifice. Americans who profess to value American lives and who support the institution of this war are sham; and this sham, this time, will open the familiar plain to an abyss unknown to the people—no longer citizens—of The United States of America.
Failure to recognize sham is to be unwoke to your peril.
Mr. Shade Burgs, military veteran, and editorialist for The Black Iowa News (congratulations Ms. James for appointing him) some time ago expressed, in the now high-jacked vernacular, the universal consequence of ignorance of sham—to be unwoke.
“Woke is something you have to be every day in this country as a person of color to ensure that you are not cheering on the same group of people who freely murder your people in the name of justice, which you will never truly know or understand or have.”
Generally, it is unwise and futile for the rational and honest to enter the thicket of deciphering “wokeness.” Its’ contrived and popularized “wokiness” usage is now utilized to describe a state of entitlement by minorities, racial, and/or national origin, and/or sex based. It was not always so. When I was a boy, precocious and being schooled, to be “un-woke” could be a parenthesis of caution to a description of endearment. But most often, “get woke” declared and cautioned the peril of the immediate and the distant streets.
The meanest streets in the world are now occupied by thousands of Iowa’s sons and daughters, ordered there by their national congressional delegation—Sham. With the endorsement of their state leadership—Sham. Unready—Sham. Ill-Led—Sham. Undefended—Sham.
Iowans, still unwoke, will thank their sons and daughters for their service. Their sacrifice. And that of their families.
Thank You, Mr. Burgs for continuing to live the vernacular while never forgetting the universal.
As a postscript to this Juneteenth, 2025, an offering from a Midwest neighbor:
Juneteenth 2017
Investiture of the Tuskegee Airmen Memorial, Memorial Park, Oberlin, Ohio
James Cannon, Gilbert Cargill, William A. Johnson, Jr., Norman E. Proctor, Wayman E. Scott, Ferrier H. White, William L. Williams, Jr., William Young, Perry H. Young, Jr.
Today we add these voices to this special Ground that continues to speak to us about the meaning of America and Oberlin's place in it. These are the voices of our own speaking truth to power. They are voices from our small community, but they are also voices representative of a larger Brotherhood, one that gave to our nation the blood, the sacrifice, and the dedication of the immortal soldier, and yet, even more.
These are the voices of monumental accomplishment against overwhelming odds of a Brotherhood that showed the world the capacity of Black Americans to master and to refine the technology of an age, to form units of extraordinary cohesion and resilience, and to extend with utmost dignity and resolve the meaning of American Democracy against the inordinate power of the state and society arrayed against it.
This votive stone of that brotherhood and our community's exceptional contribution to it will rest, as if suspended, between the quest for Peace1 and the sacrifice for Freedom2 that anchor this Memorial Ground. On this day, when America knows no peace and sacrifices to perpetual war the freedom of young and old, Black and white, this Brotherhood will forever remind us, even as victors, the truth that war is waste and only this truth shall set us free.
Delbert Spurlock, from Riffs on the State of America.
Martin Luther King Memorial
Monument to Lewis Leary, John Copeland, and Shields Green