I worked with a bipolar person years ago who was the funniest man alive when he wasn’t shooting the place up. Most days the man was hilarious. But there were those days of darkness when he was dangerous beyond belief.
One time, when he was on a rather profound “downer,” he filled the back seat of his automobile with high-powered rifles and ammunition, and drove to his step-father’s house and began shooting into the side of the building. He shot some two-hundred rounds of armor-piercing ammunition through the house, until the police converged on the scene. Then he stood behind his car and exchanged gunfire with the police. His car and the police cars were riddled with bullet holes. When he ran out of ammunition he surrendered, and the police took him to a mental institution for “evaluation.” He spend six months there and was released after his medication was adjusted to make him more-or-less normal. They gave him a certificate of mental health and he returned to work.
He came back to work as a changed man. He was so dulled by his medication that he was no longer the funny person everyone knew so well. Instead, he was moody and dull. It was impossible to talk to him about his shooting incident. But one day he told me that he had a peculiar thought while he was trading gunfire with the police. He said to himself, “Man, a guy could get killed doing this.” Indeed!
Recent news reports I’m seeing in the United States about Germany’s decision to shut down its seventeen nuclear power generation plants remind me of that bipolar co-worker. It’s like seeing and old and dear friend suddenly veer off into episodes of totally non-rational behavior. Atomkraft (or nuclear power) supplies some 22.6 percent of Germany’s electrical power. But there is a genuine fear that Japan’s nuclear problems might be replicated in Germany. Chancellor Merkel proposes - as I understand it - to shutter these plants over a period of years (until 2022) and replace them with coal-fired or natural gas-fired plants. But those fossil fuel plants will drive the Greens nuts and raise serious “greenhouse gas” concerns. More likely than not, those plants will not get built. The other alternative - windmills planted in the North Sea - would require such numbers to replace the existing electrical power generated by Atomkraft that the rotation of the Earth would be slowed by the sheer numbers of windmills required. Somehow, I see Germany beginning to shoot armor-piercing bullets through its foot.
My bipolar co-worker failed to take his medication for several days during a long national holiday weekend. He returned to his step-father’s house (newly repaired) and shot the place up again. He went back to the mental institution for a year, got himself another certificate that said he could return to work, and returned dull and moody. And then I heard, after I had moved away from the area, that he shot up his step-father’s house for a third time, He is, as I understand it, still institutionalized and will never be released for the rest of his life.
Germany, in my opinion, is loading the back seat of the automobile with guns and ammo even as we speak.
