Today in Louisville, Kentucky.  Late last week it was Nashville, Tennessee.  A few days before that, somewhere else.  It happens with such regularity that you forget the names of the places.

Today a guy walked into a bank and started shooting.  There were fatalities and there were wounded.  A shoot-out between responding law enforcement and the shooter.  The death of the shooter.  

It’s almost a predictability that it will happen again and soon.  Instead of a bank, maybe instead it will happen at a church, or a mall, perhaps a Walmart or a movie theatre, quite possibly a school.  Some deeply troubled human being will walk into some place geared up for war and will shoot it up, systematically murdering other human beings before ending up dead themselves, often by their own hand.

Trust in the mainstream media is currently at an all-time low and this has dangerous implications for the health of our democracy.  

So where did all that trust go?

People have become politically polarized, increasingly dividing themselves into “tribes” based on political beliefs.  As part of this, they tend to consume media that reinforces what they happen to believe and tune out media that runs contrary to those beliefs. Not only does contrary media get tuned out, but it also gets vilified and judged as negatively biased and not worthy of trust.

Outside of fear and hatred, there can be nothing more corrosive to the human spirit than anger.  And there seems to be plenty of it to go around.

Why are so many people so angry for so much of the time?

There’s no simple answer to this as anger can be influenced by various factors, including personal circumstances, environmental stressors, and individual differences in emotional regulation. There are, however, certain things that can be pointed to as a cause.

I see my neighbour Bert at work with all the maple trees along the street as maple syrup season has officially arrived.  I don’t know how many cans Bert has, but the number must be great as I see them hanging from just about every tree as I drive by.

Maple syrup, as any proper Canadian could tell you, is made from the sap of sugar maple trees. Harnessing and harvesting can be a real process, and that’s why it’s better that guys like Bert are doing it and not me.

I think it went up to 11 degrees today.  That’s eleven, mind you.

No howling winds or driving snow or any of that kind of mayhem.  Just a steady as-she-goes eleven, all day long.

It’s a big transition day, because you’re caught between seasons with respect to wardrobe and footwear.  I know, we all get through it in the end, but it’s worth mentioning.  Still, it’s too early to celebrate.  Tomorrow has an expected high of 2 degrees, followed by Saturday at 5.  That’s not spaghetti strap weather for most folks.

Anyways, a lot of stuff is going on right now, like the rain last night and yesterday, the melt, the fallen trees, people with no electricity.  

It was an ice storm.  Not on the same scale as that really big one back in like, 1997, but an ice storm nevertheless.  I watched large trees break apart and come down, and I bet a lot of others saw similar stuff happening.  A very dangerous series of conditions, especially for anyone in close proximity to these events.

But calm has been restored.  Although cool tomorrow and Saturday, temperatures are predicted to rise consistently into the double-digits.  

April can be a brutal month, and not a lot of fun.  Some people say what you get at Easter is what you get for the whole month.

And Easter’s supposed to look not bad.

What makes a husband and wife, father and mother, wrap up their two year-old daughter and one year-old son and attempt to cross the St. Lawrence River in the dead of winter in order to get to the United States?

Desperation I’d suggest.

Eight people were recently found dead along the shoreline of the Akwasasne reserve that straddles the Ontario-Quebec-New York border, some of them children.  These people represented two families, one from India and the other from Romania.  It was only a year or so ago that another young Indian family froze to death as they got disoriented in a winter storm while trying to cross into the U.S. at the Manitoba border.  Leading your family into danger and then not leading them back out is absolutely heart-breaking.

I feel kind of bad for Metro CEO Eric Lafleche.  Yes, it’s true, he did snag a 6.8% raise in 2022, which would be pretty impressive for rank and file workers, but to the boss-man it only resulted in a measley salary of $5.8 million a year.  A tough year for Eric to be sure.

Political assassination is not something new in Russia.  It’s the kind of place Russia is:  corrupt, oppressive, treacherous, and murderously dangerous.  It’s all Russians know.  God could come out of a cloud and set them free from it all, but Russians wouldn’t know what to do with that freedom.  Their only comfort seems to come from being under the thumb of tyranny of some sort:  czarist, communist, or Putin’s klepto-totalitarianism.

Would Russian intelligence agency FSB ever be involved in blowing up an internet cafe, killing and wounding Russians in Russia?  Is this the kind of ruthless subterfuge the successor of the KGB and NKVD could find itself involved with?

In a word, yes.

Sometimes it’s said that if you don’t like the way something works, then either do it yourself or come up with a better way.

I’ve been on my soap box talking about the egregious behaviour of the corporations that own and operate our biggest national grocery chains.  My biggest point of contention has to do with the massive profits they’ve been ringing up ever since the COVID pandemic rolled into town, and the profits they continue to make during a time of higher inflation.  In another time, this would be called profiteering, but others might view this as crafty capitalism at work.  Taking advantage of people when they’re hurting is pretty tough, though.

A new study out of Yale University has found that people tend to become angrier the more they spend time on their social media.  Facebook and Twitter were pointed out to be among the worst for this kind of thing.

The fact that people are angry is really nothing new.  Before, though, people didn’t have the extensive networks available to them to share with others their anger.  They had their friends, family, and co-workers maybe, but beyond that, they had no bully-pulpit they could take advantage of to seek out, meet, and interact with anonymous others who were also angry.

They do now, and it makes a huge difference.