A song popped into my head this evening.  It’s from an old band called Buffalo Springfield.  Steven Stills sang it…

…There’s something  happenin’ here.

What it is ain’t exactly clear…..

A fired worker comes back to the job and methodically shoots several  co-workers.

An elementary school teacher blasts his principal and assistant…critically wounding one of them.

A college professor opens fire in a meeting, and kills three colleagues, and critically wounds three more.

A woman drowns one child, and nearly drowns a second, then kills herself while on the line with 9-1-1 dispatcher.

And this afternoon, a man burns down his own house, then takes a small plane on  a one-man suicide mission, crashing into a government building… but not before he posts an on-line “manifesto” of his series of gripes

And this all in the past month, the ones that come to mind with no research into news archives.

It ain’t exactly clear.

There’s a lot of rage in America right now.   Some of it is person-against-person.  Other times, it’s person against anything- everything.

It would be easy to blame the economy.  The recession wiped blank so many of our futures.

Some say our government policy is driving people to the brink.

I have heard other folks place the bloody bodies  at the feet of our permissive society.

At the same time these stories are developing a group of doctors in Canada push for government guidelines for when mercy killing can be legal.  But they don’t call it mercy killing.  It has a more medical sounding name… but accomplishes the same thing: deciding when to kill somebody.

Are all of these stories connected?

Is there a thread that is unraveling in our society that is prompting so many of us to act in such bloody, bizarre, un-natural  ways?

After the September Eleventh attacks, we were all afraid of the terrorist from overseas.

Now, it appears we need to worry about the terrorist who lives next door and is about to blow their stack.

Oh, you say that’s not terrorism?   The people who managed to live through the violence  might argue otherwise.

Terror, is terror, is terror.

Are we turning against ourselves in fits of rage?   I hope more intellectual and influential people can come up with that answer.

The fear of a terrorist from somewhere else is rapidly fading this week into a fear of the terrorist time-bomb maniac who might be working in the next cubicle.