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…