With the word "woke" having no real meaning, people who use seem to be identifying as part of a non-defined group claiming superiority over others, like the star-bellied Sneetches in the beloved Dr. Seuss story.

As you’d expect, I heard from a lot of people in recent weeks about our decision to drop the Dilbert comic strip and replace it with a new strip called Crabgrass. People in Northeast Ohio have strong feelings about their comics.

This is not another column about comics, though. It’s a column about correspondence. And it’s a little bit about calling people woke.

We’ve had two examples recently in which I heard from a lot of people, including some who in were caustic and condescending. 

I don’t know about you, but I stop listening when someone starts the insults. Beginning an email by calling me woke or transphobic pretty much guarantees that I won’t consider whatever the point of the message is. I invite and cherish communication from our readers. I receive more than 2,000 emails and text messages a month, with a promise to read each of them.

But only if they are civil.

I’ll start with “woke.” It’s an idiotic word, with no actual meaning. Its original meaning was politically and socially aware, but it was coopted into a meaningless pejorative. Ask three people to define it and you’ll get three different definitions. It appears to be a descendant of “snowflake,” which was popular a few years ago as an insult. (One guy called me a woke snowflake this week. Is that redundant?)

Calling me woke is surely intended as an insult. It’s a way for people to say they are better than me. They’re proudly in the not-woke club, which makes them superior, like Dr. Seuss’ star-bellied Sneetches. If their goal is merely to call me a name, OK fine. I can think of far more thoughtful insults, though.

The “woke” insults came in response to the Dilbert decision, and as I said, I did not read them. Many people, however, wrote with civility to disagree with our dropping the comic strip. They explained why they don’t view what Dilbert creator Scott Adams said in a video blog as racist. Please know that I read each of the messages and emails written in good faith to explain this position, but I was not persuaded. Adams called Black people a hate group, putting them into a category normally reserved for outfits like the Ku Klux Klan. I can’t see any other reading of what he said but racism. 

The huge majority of people I heard from agree. They applaud our removal of his comic strip. 

Next, consider the people calling us transphobic. 

On a recent episode of Today in Ohio, our podcast in which editors and Editorial Board members discuss the biggest news stories of the day, we talked about the wording of a proposed amendment to the Ohio constitution to recognize a right to abortion.

I asked my colleagues whether guaranteeing the right to pregnant people rather than specifically saying women might cost votes. Many in America continue to struggle with issues involving transgender people, and I wondered whether pragmatically, the authors would have a better chance of success by avoiding the transgender controversies.

A couple of my colleagues then said they struggled some with these issues. Abortion for decades was considered a women’s rights issue. Does changing the wording alter that?

We soon heard from people who found the conversation abhorrent. They condemned us for not standing squarely with the transgender community and called us insensitive. 

Here’s the thing: The point of Today in Ohio is conversations. We discuss different perspectives. We ask questions. On the episode about the amendment, which I suspect everyone on the podcast supports, what we discussed was whether the wording choices hurt its chances for passage. 

And we mirrored conversations taking place all over America about transgender issues. A great many people are anxious about how word usage has changed, in part to be more inclusive of the transgender community. It doesn’t mean they demean people who are transgender. They just want to talk about it, to ask questions.

Condemning people for expressing concerns is a mistake. If you insult people, they stop listening, as I said. The far better path would be to have respectful conversations. If you’re in the camp that argues that what Scott Adams said was not racist, maybe you should have full and respectful conversations with those who disagree. You can listen to them, and they can listen to you.

If you feel we need to change parts of our language to be more inclusive of the transgender community, maybe you should get together with people who are anxious about that and talk it out, to help them understand these language issues on a personal level.

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about civil discourse and included a section on Braver Angels, an organization that brings people of different beliefs together for civil conversations, to have them see each other as people, not stereotypes. One of their key guidelines is to listen twice as much as you talk. Good advice there.

What we should stop doing in this country is halting any conversation with which we disagree. The conversation we had on Today in Ohio had merit. Sharing perspectives on it with civility, as others did, helps broaden the discussion. Trying to shut down the conversation builds resentment.

I’ll wrap this up with an element of a 1996 Ohio State University commencement speech, which a good friend of Ted Diadiun’s shared with him recently. The speech was by John Ong, then the chairman and CEO of B.F. Goodrich. His focus: civility.

It’s a terrific speech, well worth your time if you care to read it. It’s at https://tinyurl.com/civilityspeech

I focus here on just one part, in which he noted that Americans were losing the ability to sacrifice for the betterment of all.

We have also witnessed a growing fragmentation in our social priorities, in which particular agendas of subgroups are given primacy over what an earlier generation would have called the good of society as a whole… At the heart of civility is a willingness on the part of the individual to curb his freedom of action in the interests of the community, to sublimate his individual interests or those of a group with which he is closely associated to the greater good of society as a whole.

That’s compromise. You give some, you get some. You meet in the middle.

Ong also said this to the graduating students:

Always be civil. It is really quite easy. Treat others with respect and observe the conventions of social behavior that we call good manners. 

In other words, don’t call people woke. 

Thanks for reading.