It’s been a terrible week for casual violence.  There was a shooting at a university and then a plane crashed into an IRS office.  Nooze crews then searched through the wreckage of the lives to try to find out just what went wrong.

They probably won’t come up with anything, at least not before the next similar episode occurs.  There won’t be much of a follow-up because another event will overtake the scene of carnage.  These two episodes are just more disconnected events in a string of people who use whatever implements are at hand to lash out.  It is that disconnect that they, and all acts of violence, have in common.

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The hidden and the manifest give birth to each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short exhibit each other.
High and low measure each other.
– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 2 (John C.H. Wu translation)

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When in doubt, you can always talk about the weather in polite Minnesota conversation. Days like today, when we are expected to have a foot of snow and Olympic Ice Dancing on the roads, it’s a topic you can count on.  It’s not controversial but it provides a nearly endless supply of entertainment much like driving a flaming bus through a wall of televisions, at least in the sense that it’s likely to be lethal.

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