Today I mourn the death of a delusion. The delusion that by putting down my verbal weapons and offering an olive branch, I could co-exist peacefully with the social justice warriors in my midst.
It was a dream hatched in 2013, when, exhausted from six years rancour and confrontation, I thought I should give peace a chance. So I tried a new approach. Rather than engage them with words, I engaged them with smiles. And then they began to smile back, however contrived those smiles may have initially been. I built up relationships one person and at a time, until their numbers reached a critical mass and suddenly the word was out: I wasn’t so bad after all. In other words, the strategy seemed to be paying off. I was making progress. Then it happened.
Without warning or expectation, I found myself in a no-holds-barred shouting match with an evangelical Leftist in the village supermarket, locally famous for his boorish intrusions and unwanted observations. On this occasion, I attempted to quickly brush by him in my urgent journey to the bathroom at the back, but I failed to dodge one of his gratuitous anti-Trump remarks. This time it was about his desire to shoot the President. That was the spark. The lighted match was my quick retort that I would rather shoot him, the pious preacher of progressive depravity. An explosion followed. I left the store shaken, contemplating the potential fall-out as I walked to the car. News of a verbal fracas can travel twice around this island…