Instead of falsely accusing and cussing, which my opponents did in the instance that spawned this article, it is more honorable and helpful to dialogue, consider, and contend. Instead of calling for censorship, which one of these many opponents did, it is better to call forth the accumulation of our learning and to set it down for consideration. Instead of playing the victim, it is better to play the man.
As near as I can tell, combat arms trades in the Canadian army are three in number: infantry, armored, and artillery. A friend of mine on Facebook commented in the affirmative on a page that celebrated Canada’s first infantry-woman, Heather R. Erxleben. She was admitted into 3 PPCLI, an infantry battalion, in 1989, and resigned from the military three years later after serving her first term. The page that celebrated her was on a site called ‘Canadian Army.’ The celebration was in honor of ‘Women’s History Month.’ A dispute erupted after I stated that I would always be against women being allowed to serve as infantrymen. I soon made the dispute about the consequence of women being in combat arms trades, for the consequence, women dying in combat, is one reason why we should be against it. This is why I brought up Captain Nichola Goddard, who died in the war in Afghanistan in 2006 from ‘a chance ricochet of shrapnel’ (Ottawa Citizen) to the back of her head. I will summarize the dispute; then I will submit a commentary on the subject in question.
So the milestone being celebrated was the admission of a woman into a Canadian infantry unit in 1989. The comments were profuse, festive, and effusive. I could not see one solitary dissenting comment. This was so disappointing to me that I dissented, and laid my comment down alongside the others. My innocent comment was: “I will always be against it.” Then a pile-on against me began; eleven persons took part in it. The comment thread this produced reminded me somewhat of the script for 12 Angry Men, minus the orderliness, and with the addition of profanity. My performance was almost like that of Henry Fonda, maybe, because while I was reasonable and measured, my opponents were, by turns, unreasonable, ignorant, fanatical, and censorious. The new town square called ‘social media’ is volatile. When just one ingredient does not integrate with the aggregate, the amalgam explodes. As heated as this Facebook feud got, it was not as nuclear as what I had already faced, many times before, especially on YouTube and Amazon threads. After about fifty comments were burning up the page, I decided to exit the minefield before the administrators obeyed the call from someone called Jennifer to nuke me from it. If someone called ‘Jennifer’ accuses someone called ‘Mark’ of spouting ‘hate speech’ in Zuckerberg’s politically correct zoo, the battle is about to be ended by a dirty bomb from the cockpit of an immoderate moderator. So I stopped, gathered up the littered comments, offloaded them on my desktop, and began contemplating writing this article. Being accustomed to social media volatility, and being the kind of person who sticks the truth in there until all the bloodied victims drag themselves distressingly away, yet there are times when I mercifully allow my adversaries to experience the sudden absence of my opinionated presence. This, to everyone’s relief, was such a time as that. Before I quit thrusting, piercing, parrying, and goring; in other words, before I decided to stop ‘winning and winning’ (President Trump), I was called a troll, a birdbrain, an idiot, and a string of unmentionable expletives. Admittedly, and for my part, I went so far as to call one of the disputants an ‘ignorant moron’; and I told another two to ‘shut up.’ If this does not show my conduct to have been as pure as ‘snow in Salmon,’ yet my comments were a pretty clean molehill beside the dunghill of expletives on the other side.
