Offense is an easy election, isn't it? You don't have to take any action, do anything effective, or resolve any difference in viewpoint, you don't even have to communicate -- just whine, one-way.

And what is amazing is how many people, instead of observing that person X has elected to be offended, have to jump in and start passing judgement on the issue without much minding where it came from, passing out decrees of goodness and badness as though they had some inside track on the Akashic Handbook of Trivial Karma (High Precision Edition -- Scores up to eight decimal points!(.

It reminds me of those exploratory games that small children play to learn how they relate to each other -- they list things in the world and state which ones they like and which ones they decide are "sucky", in an effort to draw up some sort of tribal map of allegiances. They cover everything from candy to colors to TV characters to shoe styles and kinds of socks and eyeglasses. But I had always imagined that people outgrew that game as they learned a bit more about how the world is stitched together.

A