We live in a prickly age that wears its indignations on its shirt sleeves so that the world will behold our sensitivities and marvel. One that has the world walking on egg shells -- lest some raw nerve be aggrieved by the mention of an “inconvenient truth.”

You know the drill: men and women using their feigned strategically directed outrage as tin snips to emasculate the written and spoken world.  Forever growing bolder in their accusations and indictments, they issue their not so veiled advisories that if an individual should somehow see “red,” he should prudently called it “blue” for the safekeeping of civil order -- for our “children’s precious sake.”

The seed of Orwell’s Dark Perpetual City is first planted in the dull and unquestioning mind and sprouts one hundredfold when it is tended in a moral vacuum. Such men who value their skins to the exclusion of their souls, barter what yet remains of their rectitude and liberties for the thin gruel of fear. It all begins when one holds hostage the word that is burning to be spoken – or that is trembling to be put to paper.  All tyranny is weaned in this conspiracy of silence, and we should not be surprised when that babe grows up to be a monster.

Glenn Fairman writes from Highland, Ca. He can be contacted at arete5000@dslextreme.com and followed at www.stubbornthings.org and on Twitter.