It feels like ages since I offlined johnnywalnut.com. Then again, these are new days for the world. 

Amid the cacophony that passes for discourse by the right and the left — those who distort reality and those out of touch with it — we’ve muted humanity’s resting mindset, the middle, where we should want to converge so the centre can hold and we may prove Yeats wrong for our future’s sake.

Out of polite appeasement or infirmity of will, we quietly allowed the chaos and confusion to linger like ice fog. We enabled individuals with a vest-pocket vocabulary or a pathological need for either historically illiterate or histrionically wokeish associative word usages to occupy an outsize portion of the public conversation. We gave these linguistic sybarites with their hyperbolic vitiations of facts and truths a blank slate to warp the broadly liberal societal framework that affords us licence to litigate ideas freely, civilly and conscientiously. 

The result is a fragmenting world, and within it, the spread of a new community: that of the divided. It is a spectacular paradox many are oblivious to (a blissful ignorance disorder, perhaps) or abettors of (unfulfilled adolescence, anyone?). Either way, whether you’re indifferent to this new normal or indulging in it, you’re part of a massive trend. 

And why not, right? Division, unlike connection, frees us to answer only to ourselves, without consequences and without care for the ripple effects of our actions. We can be decadently unaccountable, thumb our noses at being subject to one another, draw from the well of filling our own cups before replenishing those of our fellow humans, and get piss drunk on self-love. 

Until the inevitable hangover ensues, the void and alienation after the bacchanalian narcissism evaporates, when reality comes crashing down and we fracture into a mirror maze of discontent and self-loathing. Now we need people and things to blame for our undoing of society, for peddling me-ism at the expense of the human prerogative to connect. We resort to classic black hats because we’re too yellow-bellied to point the finger at ourselves. Villains like science and education come to mind, or conversely, God and morals, although we do manage to find common ground when it comes to identity. Nothing says wretched ‘r’ us like the practice of othering. We use off-the-rack narratives to rationalize our resentment, and like toddlers learning to match language and context, we play it fast and loose with meaning until the disconnect between words and the concepts they represent is so writ large we grow inured to wanton semantic happenstance.

The nonsense is out of control and waiting it out silently hoping the world comes to its senses has proven a quixotic strategy. If act small, live big formed the original premise behind johnnywalnut.com, perhaps the act of leveraging this platform to reclaim the middle and to declaim on behalf of the many who’ve been shouted down these past years by the “passionate intensity” of the “worst” among us (more Yeats), perhaps giving agency to the reasonable majority, will in some small way lend hope in a time of rampant nihilism and lend a hand to accountable existence before it slips from humanity’s reach.

For my part, I want out of the ice fog. I want to open my mouth without fearing it will slit my tongue.