You have to get out and about, and you can’t give in to paranoia. You have to trust in the basic decency of the vast majority of people walking around. I do, at least. If there’s something twitchy in some guy walking down the aisles at Thrifty or CVS you can always sense this on some level so you just have to play it by ear and hope for the best. But deep down there’s a general feeling out there that a significant percentage of wacko types (which society has always had) are ready to go postal at any moment, and the recent shooting in Virginia is the latest of many, many reminders. It’s a very small percentage, thank fate and fortune, and an even smaller micro-percentage in liberal enclaves like West Los Angeles, but there’s nonetheless a tiny sliver of the populace today that is ready to murder strangers or co-workers or children in an elementary school when they reach their breaking point. I really, really don’t remember this malignancy being as noticable or persistent in…I don’t know when it began to seem more ominous. It’s been creeping and spreading outward for decades, but it seems to have gotten worse over the last 10 or 15 years. Post-9/11, post-Obama’s election…something. Obviously I realize that “seems” is not a statistical reality. I agree, in any case, with everything Cenk Uygur says here: