There are two phrases I say all the time these days.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
The first one ?
Wait, wait, I’m plugging in my headphones…
The second ?
The world is not well.
The other day, in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, a grandfather came down from the bleachers of a soccer field to attack a 17-year-old linesman. The sequence was filmed. She toured the internet in Quebec. Phew, phew, grandpa put his hand on the teenager’s muzzle before being pinned to the ground by a parent who hadn’t forgotten how to stop a pass receiver…
I thought, again: the world is not well.
I imagine, in six months, grandma talking to grandpa…
“Remind me why we owe the lawyer $20,000?”
“Because the referee missed an offside, darling. »
Two weeks ago, my colleague Marie-Eve Fournier said that impatient customers had already spat on employees of a Tim Hortons 1. The service was too slow for their taste…
Personal experience, well: in recent days, I have had to deal with two Crown attorneys, following complaints to the police that I had filed last winter. In both cases, the defendants admitted their guilt. In one case, death threats. The police call me after arresting the guy:
“He doesn’t know you.
– Sorry ?
“No, he read someone criticizing you on social media, he found your Facebook account and he wrote to you…”
I try to imagine what goes through a man’s head so that he comes to threaten a complete stranger with death, just because he disagrees with a chronicle.
Twenty-five years that I have been doing this job, I had never had to file a complaint with the police, until last winter…
Six months ago, I stopped counting at six.
In the United States, it is true, that the world is not well. In January, journalist Matthew Yglesias identified several indicators that quantify the rise in bad behavior, whether at school, on planes or on the roads.2. Americans buy more than gunscommit more murders, die from more overdoses, drink more…
This week, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh was violently scolded and threatened by a pack of cranks in southern Ontario3. Yes, yes, the splitting… I know. But the radicalized people of 2022, those who have the time to go and threaten to beat a politician in broad daylight, I can feel it, were yesterday’s cholerics. I recognize them. Anger is simply better exploited today.
The pandemic?
Yes, yes, the pandemic, OK…
But I find that the pandemic has a broad back, sometimes, when certain phenomena are explained. The anger was there before, just under the surface, it’s not the first time I talk about it. As I write these words, I think back to an old chronicle, I look for it and Google brings it up: November 10, 2018, it is about a municipal inspector exposed to the short fuse of his fellow citizens, who went crazy for foolishness…
I quote: “The world is unhappy…”
This was the title of the 2018 column4and see how I have more ideas: the one you are reading now is called The world is not well. But above all, see how the pandemic has invented nothing in terms of stupidity, excess, bad behavior…
And psychological distress, which makes the fuse even shorter. Already, in 2019, I was appalled by the pervasiveness of psychological distress5 : everyone was affected by that, everyone already seemed, pre-pandemic, threatened by burn-out, THAT of being addicted to antidepressants.
We have collectively never been so rich. But perhaps we have never been so unhappy. Living is pressure…
Pressure everywhere. You want to see a doctor, there isn’t one (go private); your child needs a speech therapist, there is a year of waiting (goes to the private sector); you want to buy a house, you can just afford it 60 km from your job; you’re in a hurry, you’re stuck in traffic; you are giving birth to your first child and one of your first stresses is already finding a place for him in daycare; you want to eat healthy, and the grocery bill is close to having a stroke…
You want to relax, decompress, decant: you books a ticket for the South, and there, the guilt embarks… Worse the planet, it? Well, we’re going to stay in Quebec, we’ll do a road trip…
At $2 a liter of gas.
I come back to the American findings from January that I mentioned above: in nearly 20 years, from 2000 to 2018, the proportion of American households that gave to charities fell from 66% to 49% 6…
What does it mean ?
I do not know. I just know that the dissociation is palpable, that the world is not well, that the other is more and more perceived as a threat, a nuisance. As if we thought that salvation was in everyone for himself, to the strongest – to the most angry – the pocket.
In this context, no wonder that tie-wielding mages have already soaked the easy-to-burn scarecrows in gasoline – the elites, the weirdos, the UN, the Bank of Canada, the globalist elites, the elites-at-all, the damn, the cursed ones woke… – with click, click, click lighters…