It must have been a drag back in olden times. To properly express outrage, a settler would have to hike a full day across a prairie, wade through a creek (pronounced “crick” for reasons that haven’t been determined) and brave predators in the forest just to get to the source of the offense.

Tired, scratched and baked by a hot sun, the settler would finally stumble upon the tiny farm where he sought to direct his indignation.

“Now see here,” he would gasp with what remained of his strength. “Thy scarecrow in yonder field provokes great insult upon mine eye with its crassly placed ear of corn and coupling of tomatoes. Removest thou abomination or within a fortnight, I wilst assemble a protest and order a pox upon thy acreage.”

And then the outraged settler would drop dead of starvation, leaving the bewildered farmer with the burden of burying the corpse. So take that.

Fortunately, man has progressed by such bounds that he can now get his daily fix of outrage without any exertion at all. The legacy of the Internet may be that it allows those who crave things to be mad about to find them without leaving their beds.

There are such outrage addicts among us. They spend their days fishing for things that offend them the way most of us fish for … well, fish.

They register for Web accounts with their local newspaper and a handful of national ones. They sign up for all the social networks. They mine the blogs from A to Z and keep a television running in the background to further plumb the depths of human insensitivity.

They make quick work of the easy ones, like racism and sexism.

“How DARE you use the words ‘black’ and ‘woman’ in the same sentence!” they will e-scream, in all capital letters, at a blogger who was only trying to write a soft feature about her neighbor who grows her own black-eyed peas.

Which is fair enough, I suppose, because minorities and women need watchdogs to ferret out potential incidents of bigotry and misogyny.

But the truly hooked, the people for whom moral vigilance is a passion, won’t stop at the obvious. They will scrutinize every inch of a newspaper, Web site or Facebook page in an ardent search for things that offend them. So frequent are their screams of outrage, that they create templates with which to more hastily make their protests public.

Dear (publication/individual/billboard): How DARE you! How dare you publish that comment/advertisement/comic strip when it so clearly expresses racism/sexism/perversion/other offensive matter. I fully intend to stage a protest/boycott your product/continue to send you these letters until you change your ways/admit that I am right/acknowledge me in some fashion.

I’ve heard it called “moral vanity” and I like the term. For there is a glaring difference between those who point out examples of hatred and prejudice for the purpose of educating and those who do it to bolster their own sense of self-righteousness.

The problem, of course, is sanctimony. Those who spend the bulk of their time scanning every milieu for perceived affronts become haters themselves. They attack at random, not to defend those who may have been slighted, but to prove once and for all that they have attained a moral high ground which the rest of us cretins will never reach.

And with the Web being what it is, a person can declare another guilty of high moral offense from a completely anonymous throne of piety. They can hide behind a screen name and never be required to defend or debate that judgment.

Which is just a bummer. Because I like to think that most people are benign souls who have no earnest intention of insulting anybody. But they will occasionally make misguided statements in their attempts at humor or a larger point and they will be labeled malcontents by the screeching do-gooders who fancy themselves the guardians of all written or uttered words.

By and large, nobody dares to say anything anymore because the lines of what is tasteful and distasteful have been horribly blurred by hyperactive political correctness. So they temper, edit or skip their comments entirely, and the only victim in that scenario is freedom of expression.

In that regard, maybe we were better off when a person had to work a little harder to call someone out over a perceived offense. Because as things are now, the self-righteous can attack at will without leaving his or her chair, and so he or she doesn’t have to pick the battles that are really important.

Unlike that long-ago settler who really had to commit to his cause before calling the farmer out on his disgusting scarecrow. And you have to admit, the settler had a point, because that scarecrow, displayed as it was, really was disgusting/lurid/hilarious.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. You can call him out at [email protected].