Letter: On woke extremism and 'debunked myths'

It is my understanding that to be woke is to be alert and sensitive to social injustice and racism. Carried to an extreme, it can be counterproductive to the goals it promotes.

Therefore, I was disappointed to see the paper's March, 23, 2023, front-page story headlined "Board member says schools shouldn't celebrate Columbus Day." One of the candidates said, "(We should) refrain from teaching debunked myths."

On March 28, 2022, the Daily Herald published a guest column by me that was prompted by the subtitle of the Daily Herald's, Feb. 20, 2022, editorial, "The Father of the Nation," that took the form of a penetrating question: "How should Washington's slave ownership affect our reverence for his role in the birth of our country? I wrote that the same question could be asked writ large over previously respectable people such as Christopher Columbus, Junipero, Serra, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

I went on to say: " ... a true and balanced history of America should reflect the good and the bad while still providing very good reasons to honor the significant roles played by Washington, and all the others in the complex birth of our nation."

Not doing so would be stepping on a slippery slope, which, if followed to the end, will make us always see things far worse than they really are. C.S. Lewis, commented on such situations in his 1952 book, Mere Christianity: "Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything - God, and our friends and ourselves included - as bad and not be able to stop doing that: we shall be fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred."

Frank G Splitt

Mount Prospect