As my colleague Ron Mwangaguhunga wrote in another post today, the unemployment rate in the U.S. has exceeded 10% - the highest in a quarter-century. We're in a crisis situation: The gap between the rich and poor in this country is now on-par with countries like Mexico and Turkey, places where the wealthy can live like kings while masses of people barely survive.

It's disturbingly easy to understand these days how a man like Jason Rodriguez could walk into his former employer's office and open fire. On Friday, while the ink was still drying on stories about the massacre at Fort Hood last Thursday, the 40-year-old resident of Orlando, Florida entered the offices of Reynolds, Smith & Hills and shot one man dead and injured five others.

When asked about his motivation, Rodriguez, who was fired in 2007 for sub-standard work, according to people at the firm, said plainly: "Because they left me to rot."

Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal, a book about such incidents, says that most men - and they're almost always men - have no history of violence prior to their crimes. They're often just regular guys for whom the pressures of unemployment, hunger, and being rejected reached a boiling point and left them with seemingly one option: to exact revenge.

The term "going postal" dates back to 1986, when 14 people were killed by a postal worker in Edmond, Oklahoma. Over the next few years, several more postal workers shot others or themselves, giving rise to the expression that is now used to describe any act of work-or school-inspired violence.

There was a time when Falling Down, the 1993 movie about a laid-off office worker who spends a day losing his mind in L.A. while waving a gun around, was seen as extreme enough to be highly unlikely. It was entertaining, and at points even funny. Somehow I don't think so many people would find a scene like this so amusing today.