There’s a lot to unpack about the awkward, subheadlined-item in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Feb. 24 release about the $3.02 billion allocated to Ukraine—it certainly caught a few people’s attention.
I write of course about the $4 million allocated to “Gender-inclusive demining for sustainable futures in Ukraine.”
The use of anti-personnel mines in Ukraine is well-documented; various anti-mine advocacy groups including the UN, Human Rights Watch and the HALO Trust—which will receive the $4 million—have reported on the millions of mines across thousands of square kilometers of Ukrainian farmland.
Anti-personnel mines are designed to maim victims in essentially any way you can think, and are set off by proximity or by being stepped on; blast mines can blow off limbs; fragmentation mines spray out metals; bounding mines launch to chest height and then detonate.
Mines act as area-denial tools that slow the advance of opposing forces—they are hidden, difficult to defuse, and maim more than they kill—and there are millions of them contaminating the Ukrainian steppes.
It’s a serious subject, and it deserves the attention and focus of governments the world over.
Yet, here we are in Canada, stumbling over the inclusion of buzzwords that are completely out of place in announcing support for an initiative that is, by all accounts, deserving of even more funding than it’s getting.
It’s a case study in why so many are being turned away from progressive politics; because it’s completely off in la-la-land with the rainbows and butterflies, muddying the waters of any and every issue—many of which, like demining, are completely inappropriate forums for their rhetoric—and distracting from the issues at hand.
“Gender-inclusive demining” certainly had the incredulity flowing online, but an intuitive wander down the rabbit hole of landmines tells most people the victims tend to be male, whether it’s an active warzone or an inactive warzone, given where landmines often go: On farmland.
The military and agricultural sectors are both male-dominated, so it’s little wonder why the buzzword focus would have a few scratching their heads.
For the record, of course mines affect everybody even remotely near a warzone. Their infliction upon society is ruthlessly gender inclusive, so why do we even use those words to guard against imagined accusations of exclusionary funding? It doesn’t make sense.
Using the type of terminology seen in the release last week is just evidence of how divorced from reality woke language can make its users seem. Does anyone really think the average Ukrainian cares whether efforts to clear mines from around their homes are gender-inclusive? They want the explosive traps that kill people gone—not for everyone to feel good about the process.
Woke language is just fodder for the internet, red meat for those who want nothing more than to be outraged by everything, and it’s completely self-inflicted. Easy to take out of context, and nothing but a distraction, its inclusion does little for discourse, and I’d posit it’s because woke language isn’t in line with the English language.
Why? Well because headlines, subheadlines, memos, briefs, vignettes—whatever you want to call a quick and easy dump of pertinent information—is meant to be just that: A short and concise delivery of key points of data that help the reader understand what is happening and why, inviting further investigation with a positive inquisitorial reaction, but without requiring it be compulsory in order for them to catch the right end of the stick.
Woke language is cryptic, and requires the reader to know more all at once—and we all know most people don’t go past a headline. Of course they should, but they don’t, and headlines and subheadlines are left to carry the burden of information.
Woke language in those headlines just makes information harder to absorb, harder to appreciate, and harder to comprehend in a way that degrades any and all discourse, achieving the opposite goal of what that sort of language wants to do.
It would be wonderful if everyone absorbed all the information they needed all at once, but society doesn’t work that way, human brains don’t work that way, and the English language doesn’t work that way.
So cut it.
