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I promise this isn’t a right wing diatribe complaining about all things woke, because I agree with the vast majority of the standard left-wing agenda. Some issues fully, others in part. So why is it that I’m still often left feeling something’s off?

For that I’ll quote Amod Lele

A while ago I identified what I considered the Social Justice movement ‘s first tenet: that the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity). I stand by that description. I think that that view is implicit in Ibram X. Kendi’s most widely quoted idea: that neutrality is a mask for racism, that anyone who isn’t actively antiracist is racist. Because that idea directly implies that one must prioritize racism over other issues, that neutrality might be acceptable on other issues but not on this one.

The problem then is prioritisation. I remember this during the height of Covid and thinking that honestly, I doubt Covid was in the top five, maybe not even the top ten public health issues facing Ukraine. That’s not to say that nothing should have been done, but balancing complex public health needs is absolutely not easy and calling for radical, single-minded solutions almost certainly made the overall picture of public health in Ukraine worse. I’d be willing to guess this is true of many other places.

As the media are increasingly homogenised, or more bluntly americanised, there’s a real tendency to take issues that may be relevant in the US and export them to left-wing outlets and parties across the world. There’s a political cause working memory problem—I don’t think most people can meaningfully care about more than three to five major issues.

For obvious reasons, the war in Ukraine will continue to be what I care the most about. But I fully understand that it’s completely irrelevant to other people. That’s ok. We should encourage building coalitions and letting people put their energy into what inspires them. And that may well be community gardens, cycling infrastructure, and the local library. That’s also ok.

Let’s say you had a magic wand and could fix any three social issues in the world. You’d be very hard-pressed to make a case that gender identity should be on your short list. It affects a tiny group of people. Perhaps the war in Gaza? But why that over the much wider-scale and deadlier wars in Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen, or Myanmar?

That’s why this is a good thought experiment. You can’t have it all, and accepting what that looks like should make you question the editorial stances of NPR and the New York Times.