The war against the symbols of racism took a surreal and bizarre turn in the last week as social justice warriors took to social media to complain in two separate incidents of a hugely disturbing phenomenon.

Who would have guessed that cotton was a trigger?

First, Hobby Lobby made the mistake of offering for sale cotton stalks in a vase as an item to be used in home decor.  Innocuous, right?  Not for SJWs desperately seeking something – anything – to attack as "racist."

That's right. We can't use cotton because 160 years ago, it was a primary source of income for white plantation owners who used slaves to pick it.  It won't do any good to point out that cotton is no longer handpicked and cleaned by slaves.  It's what was going on a century and a half ago that matters.

Have these people lost their minds?  If they have, their mental disease is contagious.

A college president will meet with black students after he hosted a dinner for some of them and used a cotton stalk centerpiece that apparently triggered rage over this racist symbol.  (The dummy also served collard greens with the meal.  Perhaps he would have sent them to the mental hospital if he had served watermelon.)

Tennessean:

Lipscomb University President Randy Lowry said he would meet with black students this week in the wake of a controversy over the decor and food at a dinner in his home.

Lowry said he would make "special efforts" to talk to students who were offended by cotton stalk centerpieces that were set out last week for the dinner he hosted for black students enrolled at Lipscomb.

"We'll invest a lot of time this week talking with students and trying to understand at deeper levels," he said. "Rather than running away from something, I'll lean into those kinds of conversations and relationships."

Some students took to social media to criticize the centerpieces, which they considered a callous symbol of slavery. Students also took issue with the menu, which featured collard greens and corn bread a day after Latino students had come to Lowry's house for fajitas.

On social media, students described Lowry's initial reaction to their concerns as flippant. They said he brushed aside their concerns and suggested cotton was not offensive.

Lowry issued a public apology to the students on Friday and doubled down Monday in an interview with USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee, saying he understood students' concerns and would continue to seek forgiveness.

"You roll these things back and you wish you would have spent more time here and said these words more carefully," he said during an interview from his office. "The bottom line is students were invited to my house for dinner. And I wanted to host them and celebrate their being at this university. I am extraordinarily sorry that anything got in the way of that.

The president's mortal sin was that he didn't walk on eggshells when planning the dinner.  He failed to take into account the stratospheric hypersensitivity of the snowflakes, whose paranoia has now become so pronounced that whatever link to reality they had has been totally severed.

You can see where this is headed.

1. Sugar will be removed from restaurant tables because it is a reminder of the sugarcane harvest by slaves.

2. SJWs will accost people smoking or chewing tobacco, berating them for using a product grown by slaves.

3. There will be a movement to outlaw rum because of its involvement in the "Triangle Trade" during the 1800s.

Could never happen, right?  Come back and visit in a few years.  What surreal attacks we can imagine will pale in comparison to the reality of how the tragically diseased minds of these snowflakes work.