I found it fascinating that one of the first things the new leaders in our new America did was to ridicule and turn on an American culture they called “the woke.”

To my surprise, those were the very people in the culture who, until recently, were called “very good people.” Before organized religion collapsed at the hands of the new moneylenders, “good” was something that would be rewarded by God in Heaven.

The priests and rabbis all said so. So did the Presidents.

Suddenly, the old idea of being good got the good people arrested, fired,  and worse.

It is like humans to be both good and bad. We are emerging from a revolution about the Good. I believe we are already witnessing a revolution of the “woke.” They are awakening once more. It’s a lot more fun than hating.

They will see that being bad is not only no fun, but is frightening, cruel, and awful to see.

Living where I live, I’ve come to understand the MAGA revolution as a revolt against the people who thought themselves superior. Now, we are about to witness another revolution, this one the revolution of Good.

If you know your history, you know the wheel turns and turns.

It seemed that so much of the country was sick and tired of being told what to do, how to be, and what was good. Newcomers were supported; old-timers were not. That’s what it looked like to them.

Good, like Christianity itself, seemed to weaken, and people who thought of themselves as “good” were labeled “woke” and persecuted all over the country. Being good didn’t get people elected to anything, certainly not the White House.

In fact, the world turned upside down. Lying was good. Cruelty was great. Abuse was overlooked. Cruelty was the New Good.

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The war on the “woke” was the political version of the French Revolution, only with subpoenas, threats, vicious social media assaults, and book burnings.

I don’t really know what it means to be “woke”; it has never been defined but draws content from much of the new politics and media. This is sad, because the people who have suffered the most from this sharp turn in our culture were the ones who often depended on the “woke” for support in a difficult and increasingly expensive world.

But the unintended consequence of this war against people in need was to remind the do-gooders that they were important. They are fighting back everywhere in the country.

In my conservative community, do-gooders have a bad name, often called elitists and cultural bigots, labeling people who disagree with them as snobs and racists and unknowing people who thought themselves superior.

There is widespread belief – there is some truth to it – that the “woke” only cared about certain kinds of people, and not about the countless number of rural people who watched in fury as the “elitists” in  Washington took their jobs away and only cared for the outliers and newcomers, many of them illegal.

It was wonderful to give money to the world’s poor; nobody bothered to give it to our own rural poor, whose sons had turned to overdoses in the face of hopelessness.

There was a hatred for the idea of the “woke”; we all knew who they meant. The whole idea of humanity was turned upside down, and good disappeared from public discourse.

I am not especially religious and am not soft and squishy like the monks and saints we read so much about. I’ve always been conservative in my politics and in my life. I am not interested in sports or athletics. I often voted Republican when it was more moderate and compromising.

Yesterday, I wore shorts outdoors for the first time in my life. I was taught early on not to curse or give money to beggars or the poor (I was told they would only steal it.

In recent years, as I got older and had a new shot at a meaningful life, I delved into the nature of a Spiritual Life, and it was there that I learned what good really means. I did not wish to be angry or feel superior. Being happy meant doing Good, not because I expected to be noble, but because I wanted to be happy.

Every time I see something in the news that turns my stomach, I do some good. I feel better instantly. It has kept me grounded and hopeful during this very sad and chaotic time.

That was the revolution for me. Doing Good is the absolute extreme of hatred. It makes people happy by definition, and not cruel. It keeps me helpful and alive.

I’ve noticed that the haters never smile unless they are laughing at someone.

I did little good for people outside of my own life and paid little attention to the poor and the suffering. I was living close to despair. I made few friends and tended to make the people who met me nervous.

I took a year to contemplate my life, and in that time, I experienced my own kind of revelation.

I was in despair, lonely and depressed and confused.

I read a book by Thomas Merton, The Seeds of Contemplation, and spent a year on a hill reading books and contemplating my own life. It was a good idea.

I was very much alone at the time, and I read that despair was the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the misery of damnation rather than seek happiness from whatever God they worshipped.

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People like me were denying or incapable of fulfilling my destiny on their own. This blew my mind a bit. There was a wonderful, if not simple, world out there waiting for me to join if I could only shed my own obsession with my unhappiness.

“But a man who is truly humble cannot despair, because in the humble man there is no longer any such thing as self-pity,” wrote Merton.

This rang a lot of bells for me. The way to end despair was to think less of myself and more of others, to love others more than myself. My marriage to Maria opened this door for me. I loved her more than I loved myself.

I had been feeling bad about myself for years. I was glad to make the switch.

I was a lot of things; humble was not one of them. I have been working on it. I’ve come a long way. Working with people with low incomes ensures humility. And there is no self-pity left in me. I don’t miss it.

The joy of the very mystical love of life springs from a liberation from what some call “self-hood” by working to annihilate pride.

The way I worked on doing that was to dwindle to a vanishing point in this narcissistic and greedy world and become absorbed in my own idea of God through the center of my new nothingness.

I am not important; I am a bug on the butt of life, a dot in the universe.

I see now I had a common and false humility, which was a joy and a pride to seek the highest point of greatness – the perfection of contemplation, the mystical union with the divine.

My goals are different. I want to have three things.

Love.

Happiness.

Meaning.

I had no idea it was so simple.