The Jazzed-Up-Zombie Drug and Its Side Affects

Everybody I know is hissing and spitting, carping and griping at one another.

I got out of the dentist’s office today (broke a tooth) and found a snotty text from a family member on my iPhone. Instead of shrugging it off, or, as the Scriptures suggest, giving a soft answer, I called them up and was snotty back.

It’s as if every person I’ve talked to in the past couple of days has been like an angry wasp looking for someone to sting, and now I’m catching the angry wasp flu myself.

Is it something in the drinking water? Or is it coming from our televisions?

Are we suffering from a societal case of the over-stimulated heebie-jeebies?

We have had to put up with a lot of vicarious trauma in the past year, ranging from wealthy, gun-toting post-adolescent males who murder everybody they encounter, to killer weather and a President and Supreme Court who have decided that overturning the family structure on which our entire civilization is built is the neatest idea since Tom Sawyer convinced Becky Thatcher to go spelunking. The fact that the rest of us can see that these folks have no better road map than Tom did doesn’t seem to matter.

And, of course, there’s the economy. The stinking, stewing, going nowhere economy. Our “leaders” lie about the economy, just like they do most else. They’ve cooked the books on the statistics until those statistics are disconnected from the reality of the American people, and — dare I say it? — the economy they are supposed to report. Everyone ignores and will not admit that the reason we don’t have any jobs is that we exported them, along with our industrial base. A country that can’t manufacture it’s own goods is a vulnerable nation.

Then, there’s the little matter of the government putting all of us — and I mean all of us — under surveillance to keep us “safe.” And our missing-in-action press can’t be bothered to ask who’s going to keep us “safe” from the government. Meanwhile the folks in Washington are scratching around, trying to find another war to get us into. It’s as if they fear peace; which, I think, they perhaps do. After all, where are the profits for the corporate war machine going to come from if we run out of wars?

Then, there’s Zimmerman and other nonsensical and utterly trashy means of controlling the populace. Watching cable news doesn’t inform you. It shuts your brain off by focusing it on trash, kind of like giving you a drug of some sort that puts you to sleep and makes you crazy, both at once — a jazzed-up-zombie drug that’s mainlined into our brains via the endless blab and no news on the cable news.

To top if off, the Pope resigned.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am all in for Pope Francis.

But Popes aren’t supposed to resign. Popes are supposed to hang in there until the Lord calls them home. But the Pope resigned.

Is this why everybody is in such a lovely, lovely mood?

Have we reached a sort of midsummer trough because we are momentarily between disasters, and we’re sliding into disaster withdrawal? Has the media succeeded in hypering its audience into such a frenzy that even a few days of ordinary time have become unbearable?

I dunno.

All I know is that everybody I encounter is double grouchy and seems to have a chip on their shoulders. They are weird and ticked off and they don’t know why. But as soon as some little something comes along that focuses their weird tickedoffness, they ram the snotty little comment maker we all have in the reptilian basements of our brains into gear and they are off.

Unfortunately for me, I hang with people who tend to be extraordinarily gifted at the verbal arts. That means that when the snotty commenter takes them over, they can come out with some really poisonous stuff. You can bleed for days from one of their barbs.

But even for them, with all their skills and extraordinary ability to make things seem to add up even when they don’t, the story doesn’t track. The rage outpaces the annoyance, and the arguments tend to negate the reasons they give for why they’re angry.

There’s something going on here. I don’t know what it is.

But I’m tired of it.