Is it just me, or has there been a mark increased in irritability among intelligent people lately? Especially since noon, January 20, 2001. I mean, smart people flying off the handle about incidents that before that troubling date would’ve been brushed off and ignored.

Certainly, a good case can be made that, in spite of its many attractive features, the most potent characteristic of this universe, as far as human beings are concerned, is its tendency to irritate.

The cosmic irritants in question of course range in size and intensity from the small to the ridiculously large. The big irritants (pain, death, Bill Gates, etc.) there’s not much we can do about.

The smaller irritants are a different matter. Indeed, for millennia, sages in cultures everywhere have all come to the same conclusion: The most reliable measure of maturity is the degree to which a given person reacts to and deals calmly with these smaller irritants.

Yet it seems that since the Official Re-Ascendancy of Small Minds and Greedy Fingers on January 20, 2001, persons who through their lives try to make generous sense out of this on-the-whole irritating universe are finding it more and more difficult just to get from one moment to the next with any semblance of equanimity.