Angry Birds? Angry People!

Hello people. Yes, my beauty overwhelms the senses. Let's move on. Is it just me or are people, in general, growing angrier? At first I thought, and rightfully so, that people were just plain rude, but now I believe they may be acting more out of anger and frustration than just bad manners. What, I asked myself, could possibly be making people so angry. It's been a pretty decent winter so, it can't be the weather. The entertainment media has mercifully stopped obsessing over Jersey Shore so it can't be "Situation" overload. The Girl Scout cookies have arrived so the "Tagalong" issue is solved. MSG is back on Time Warner so we can all go Lin-sane. (And they say you shouldn't put MSG on anything! What do "they" know) Sorry. What could it be? The price of gasoline is headed north of $4 a gallon and probably higher. That could be a factor. Then I read an article in the local paper that told the story of two deputies at the county jail who are padding their pensions by working hundreds of hours of overtime leading up to their retirement. These guys are working so hard they're even putting in overtime while on vacation and on sick days, doubling their base pay and raising their pensions to more than what their actual salaries are. One guy actually put in 101 hours in one week! (that's 14.42 hours a day for 7 days if you're keeping score at home). I'll bet he was bright eyed and bushy tailed by the end of that run! But that can't be making people angry because their Union Rep clearly stated that they had earned the right to do just that and people should lighten. The fact that, because of their age, they'll probably be collecting that inflated pension for more years than they actually worked shouldn't be a problem either because "That's the way it works". Then I read an article in the New York Post that outlined the dramatic increase in people filing for (and receiving) Social Security Disability. It's really strange but it seems people who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment insurance are going mad! That's right. More than 10.5 million people received disability checks in January. (that's 5.3% of the entire population ages 25-64). Among those, 43% claimed mental illness as their disability. About 2 million of those claims were paid out to spouses and children of the aforementioned disabled worker, to the tune of about $200 million taxpayer dollars a year. This surely can't be making people angry because there is an upside! Once you go on disability, you're no longer considered unemployed! That means the unemployment numbers will continue to go down! Lower unemployment numbers means the future is rosy. So, that can't possibly be the problem. I KNOW! It must be the question of "who should pay for birth control"! That's why they've been debating that so much! It's making people really angry.
Sway