My dad and one of his closer neighbors got mad about a quarter and didn't speak to each other for eight years.

I suppose there was a principle involved, but I never quite figured out what it was. The two men eventually made up. Whether they got over it or got tired of it, no one will ever know.

In their generation, though, getting mad meant something. That's no longer true. Getting spitting mad happens so often now that it just doesn't matter much to anybody. It doesn't matter because there's that weak dam upstream holding back a reservoir of anger that could break any minute.

We're all so busy getting mad that we don't have time to get mad. We've nearly reached the point that we have to schedule a blistering retort, one that we never seem to get delivered because something or someone else had made us mad about something completely different.

This has got to be hard on our systems. Health, both physical and mental, suffers from it, but we never seem able to get a handle on the cause.

It's probably time to listen to Pogo the Possum, that little cartoon character who spent his time philosophizing in the swamp.

“We have seen the enemy,” he said from his Romanesque headgear, “and he is us.”

It's hard to get a handle on anger, because getting mad is so easy. As the adjoining column by Mr. McNay lays out, we are losing face to face communication. Read a few blogs on the Internet and you find that unlimited space people are moving into where they feel they can say things that surpass provocative. They throw knives from places in which they can't ever be traced by the knifee.

Terrorists use this space. Pedophiles use this space. Lovers create beautiful or handsome erroneous characterizations of themselves in this space. Illicit drug kingpins use the space. I could go on with the list, but it's enough to make you mad.

Unlisted cell phone numbers are nearly as bad. You can give your cell phone number to a friend, but if that person gets mad at you -- very likely these days -- he can give the number to some pretty rotten acquaintenances of his. You can pay for caller ID, of course, but it makes you mad to have to pay good money for something like that.

As with any other social phenomenon, there are folks who see dollar signs in all of this. Our court systems are getting clogged with what most of us say face to face are frivolous lawsuits. We get mad again when we're told we don't have a case. And if we do have a case, it can take years to get it through the system and only partially resolved in a compromise in which nobody really wins. Both sides are merely a little less mad than they were before. Meanwhile, a dozen other things have made you madder than the case.

All of it is creating growth industries in things like “anger management,” whatever that is. I think it means that it's all right to be angry, but you don't have to tell 500 people how mad you are, getting madder with each telling, and getting half the listeners mad at you for horning in on their own anger about having to listen to it.

The worst thing about anger, of course, is that it pulls in a lot of other people. When we're mad at somebody, we fail miserably at confronting the individual we're mad at. (This can be hazardous to one's health and wealth.)

But when we resort to talking somebody else into socking it to ‘em, we drag in folks who are often up to their ears in their own and countless other peoples' anger. That's everybody from peace officers to hit men, from preachers to prosecutors, from governors to God, from teachers to... yes, even reporters. In the past, I think women have been better at this than men, but men are gaining on them real fast.

So what do we do about all those terrorists, gossips, bloggers, anonymous provocateurs, greedy types, axe-grinders, those without personal scruples and all those others who see some gain for themselves in either real or pretend anger?

There are several things: