By David Marentette — RCMP Veteran (S/Sgt.) & Counsellor-in-Training
I. The Hum Beneath the Noise
I’ve been a police officer for two decades, and it’s still strange when a siren stops. The silence doesn’t calm me; it exposes how long I’ve been holding my breath. My first inhale feels rough, like sand scraping the inside of my skull. For a heartbeat, time lurches. Calm and chaos sit side by side. Then I breathe again, remember what I’m there to do, and the spell breaks.
Across Canada and beyond our borders, we keep pretending the noise of outrage and fear will fade, and that peace will come with it. I’m not so sure.
Something restless stirs beneath our routines, like heat under stone. The Balrog in the deep isn’t just a myth. The Lord of the Rings isn’t just a story, fine — or movies if you must (insert judgy eye roll here). To me, it’s what happens when fear and fatigue sit too long in silence. Eventually, it finds a way out. And if you catch a few more Tolkien echoes along the way, that’s just the nerd in me showing through.
The economy, the headlines, and the endless scroll are experts at reminding us how cooked (thank my son for the cool kid lingo) the world really is. Every feed feels like a litany of heartbreak and outrage, proof that something in our systems, and in us, is wearing thin. Fear keeps stacking up, like waffle batter I keep over-pouring even though I know it’ll spill. I tell myself this time will be different. It rarely is… fine, it never is.
Every alert, ping, and little red dot whispers that I’m missing something. The same systems that feed my anxiety, FOMO or otherwise, now sell me the cure. All it takes is a credit card and a promise of premium peace. The quiet itself has become a product.
As an elder millennial police officer, I remember the silence before the Internet and the explosion of possibility it brought. But I’ve also watched it morph into a constant hum, a static that fills the background of our minds wherever we turn. I’ve seen how that hum rewires how we see each other. After enough noise, everything becomes stimulation. For a while our brains mistake it for pleasure, but headline after headline turns it into a drumbeat of unease. Compassion dulls. Empathy slips. And when tension builds without a target, we invent one. It’s not always hate. It’s the human urge to name what hurts.
Even the wealthy can’t buy peace; they just build thicker walls. The hum still finds them. So we blame easy targets: immigrants, neighbours, faiths, anyone whose identity sits outside our comfort. But the tension doesn’t come from them. They’re only stand-ins for our own unrest.
As Bilbo Baggins said, “I feel thin, stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” The cracks appear slowly. Each crisis, economic, political, or personal, presses harder on our patience and empathy until something inside gives way. A small piece of what makes us good gets traded for convenience. Those cracks are the marks of collective exhaustion, a shared trauma still waiting for repair.
II. The Architects of Division
Every era has its merchants. Ours sells certainty at a premium. Media empires, influencers, and politicians learned long ago that outrage is the fastest path to power. In a world humming with confusion, even false clarity, the kind that offers blame and lies instead of truth and facts, can find a market.
Social media is no better. It’s a screen of curated lies. Watch too much Fox News and you will drown in conservative ads and outrage. Switch to CNN and the algorithm will feed you a daily dose of liberal indignation instead. Different colours, same poison. No matter what you believe, the system can sell you hate and anger before you even notice. Worse, you will think you are being a good person, maybe even doing God’s work.
The outrage is real, and it does not matter whether it comes from a pundit, a preacher, or a politician. What matters is that it feels simple.
And the formula is simple, almost embarrassingly so. Take the unease that everyone feels, add a villain, then promise to fight on everyone’s behalf. For best results, make the villain divisive. Immigrants, elites, scientists, journalists, really anyone will do. Turn citizens into customers and customers into believers. Feed us stories that soothe our inner ache. Tell us someone else took what was ours. Anxiety wants a culprit, profit provides one, and we play our part, often without even realizing it.
I see it every day. Outrage dressed as conviction. Whole industries turning identity into a business model. Every scroll, every like, every “share if you agree,” becomes another vote in a conflict none of us ever meant to join.
As a police officer, I’ve seen the damage up close. Families fractured. Elders isolated. Youth radicalized. Men, women, trans, gay, straight, it really doesn’t matter. The machine doesn’t care who bleeds, only that someone does. Hatred is profitable, and if the targeted group hates us back, even better. Division keeps the engine running. After all, nobody demands better for the modern peasant if we’re all too busy pissing on each other.
The Engineering of Emotion
I have spent enough years in human crisis to know what fear does to attention. Online, it works the same way. Fear spikes engagement. Engagement sells ads. No conspiracy needed, just incentives. We built the machine and then blamed it for doing its job. Every click confirms that outrage pays. Every pause over a headline trains the system a little better.
Empathy is inefficient. Anger is renewable.
We medicate restlessness with scrolling instead of silence. Conversation turns into content. Nuance gets edited out because it is too slow, too quiet, too human. Platforms do not need truth; they need reaction. And the strongest reactions come from the worst feelings.
The Greeks (see, I’m not just a Tolkien fan) warned of sirens who sang sailors toward ruin, their beauty hiding destruction. Ours do not sing. They lure through endless dopamine loops. Their melody is outrage. Their rhythm is the algorithm. Their cliffs are glass screens built from greed, calling us toward our own wreckage one swipe at a time.
Tolkien had the same warning (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Evil rarely roars; it whispers. The One Ring promised control while it corrupted, not by force but by longing. The same hunger that once drove a hand to clutch the Ring now drives us to cling to the illusion of control sold through consumption. We post, buy, perform, and call it meaning. Like Sméagol, we risk losing ourselves and hurting the people around us in the process.
Still, I believe the human spirit is stronger than the siren’s call or the lure of the Ring. Like Odysseus sealing his crew’s ears with wax, we can quiet the noise long enough to hear something better.
The Myth of Two Sides
Division is easier to sell when it feels like a choice: left or right, freedom or control, patriot or traitor. The illusion simplifies everything. You do not have to understand policy or economics. You only have to pick a team.
Manufactured Meaning
The real product isn’t ideology. It’s identity. We don’t just adopt beliefs; we merge with them. An opinion is no longer something to discuss or debate, instead it’s part of who we are. A post becomes a performance. And in trading our personhood for identity, something vital slips away: the freedom to doubt, to question, to change our minds, or to simply not know.
Faith in God, whatever that means for you, or faith in each other, has been traded for faith in the feed. Validation is now a public event. Outrage is proof of belonging. And meaning is starting to cost money.
The architects of division do not invent pain. They mine it. They turn confusion into a resource, anger into profit, and isolation into loyalty. The hum grows louder, not because it’s new, but because someone learned how to amplify it.
III. The Cost
It’s easy to measure profits, engagement, and reach. It’s harder to measure what they take. The hum is not only in our politics now; it’s in our bodies. It shows up in the way we brace for every headline, scroll past joy as if it’s suspicious, and check our phones before we check on one another.
Something inside us tightens. We speak faster, rest poorly, and trust less.
We have become fluent in irony and allergic to sincerity. Vulnerability feels like bad strategy. Each attempt to reach across differences risks misunderstanding, so many people have stopped trying. What used to be community became performance. What used to be dialogue became commentary.
We have the metrics for everything except the cost of staying human. But the data never tells the whole story. Every statistic about burnout, trust, or disconnection hides a thousand small nights where someone kept going because they had to. The following was one of mine.
I remember a New Year’s Eve shift in a bustling City. It was one of those nights where every call felt like the end of the world — a stabbing, an impaired driver, a sexual assault that became a domestic. Every choice meant someone else had to wait longer for help.
I pulled a drunk driver off the road, let him go, and wondered if he’d ever know how close he came to dying, or to killing. Hours later, I stood in a kitchen across from a man staring at a knife, feeling my pulse thudding in my ears.
When I finally came home, I said what cops, military personnel, first responders, teachers, nurses, and doctors say when there are no words left: “I’m fine.”
The consequences are not abstract. Loneliness grows, not loud or with spectacle, but steadily and with anonymized malice. In early 2024, about 13% of Canadians reported feeling lonely often or always. Each figure is a postponed repair or a conversation we were too tired or too busy to have. Families fracture along voting lines. Friends vanish into curated worlds to escape. The common language of empathy, which once bridged strangers, now sounds foreign on our own tongues.
These numbers aren’t abstract economics; they’re the arithmetic of stress that shapes how we live. Since 2019, prices in Canada have climbed by nearly 20 percent. In Alberta, average one-bedroom rents are up roughly 30 percent since before the pandemic. Behind each percentage point is a family tightening their budget, a dream delayed, or a conversation about what to cut next.
Behind every percentage point is a heartbeat.
Real weekly earnings in Alberta have fallen compared to 2019, even as they rise nationally, meaning modest raises still fail to cover the basics. In practice, a salary that felt stable six years ago is now stretched thin. Groceries, utilities, housing, and taxes leave less space for rest and repair. This silent pressure rewired how families live, save, and recover. It appears as delayed plans, thinner margins, and shorter patience. This is the cost we rarely calculate, the erosion of trust, not only in institutions or leaders, but in the basic goodness of one another. By late 2024, only about 44% of Canadians said most people can be trusted. The siren went off years ago, but the echo remains in us as that low hum of a species forgetting one another.
Most of the ways we find each other again are small: remembering a name, showing up, and offering a shoulder before a word is spoken.
IV. The Remembering
Repair does not start with noise.
It begins in the pauses, the moments when we stop reacting long enough to notice the ache beneath our certainty. That is where remembering starts.
We start small. A neighbour’s name remembered. A conversation that does not need to be won. A silence that no longer feels suspicious. These gestures sound trivial until we admit how starved we are for the basics. Trust does not rebuild through declarations, proclamations, or executive orders. It returns through repetition, eye contact, shared work, steady effort, and the simple proof that we still extend humanity to one another.
You can see it in the people who choose decency when no one is watching. Every time a police officer chooses integrity over convenience. Every time a first responder steadies chaos instead of mirroring it. Every time a dad hugs his child after a hard day. Every time a mom cheers for both teams. Every time a teacher extends empathy to a “difficult” student because they know that student carries the heaviest story.
No headline captures them, but they hold the line between fracture and repair. The weight does not lift all at once. It fades the way it formed, gradually and beneath the surface, as we choose connection over performance. There is no siren to tell us when it is safe again. We will know it by the quiet.
But even as we rediscover our capacity for quiet, the world outside grows louder still.
V. The Choice
Humanity is under pressure. You can feel it in the price of food, the weight of taxes, the heat of the climate, and the politics of migration. Every direction we turn, urgency pushes back. We tell ourselves we are responding to threats, yet most days we are dancing to distractions.
While we dance, something darker gathers, that low hum beneath our laughter. The tone of our conversations has sharpened. Compassion is called naive. Cruelty passes for strength. Depression spreads like weather, not always visible, but always there. Despondence, apathy, and hate move freely. They need no passport and respect no border. We in Canada, especially in Alberta, are not immune.
The deeper emergency is existential. It is the slow forgetting of what it means to be human together. When empathy is mocked as weakness, when decency is treated as performance, when our capacity to care is dismissed as manipulation, then we know with certainty that we are watching humanity detach from its own soul.
Humanism needs to win, not as a slogan, but as a practice. It is a daily discipline. People are not abstractions. Kindness is not optional. Empathy remains the gold standard, the last currency that cannot be counterfeited, the quiet act that can steady a world coming apart.
If there is a siren left to sound, it is not warning us of collapse. It is calling us back to ourselves, urgently, and with great care.
In every faith, the call is the same. Judaism teaches repair before judgment; Christianity, mercy before power; Islam, compassion before pride; Hinduism, balance before desire; Buddhism, presence before possession; and Sikhism, service before self. Even among the secular, conscience
whispers the same thing: we belong to each other.
Indigenous teachings remind us to walk with honour, respect, and reciprocity toward all living things and to remember that the relationship itself is precious.
Our secular ideals echo the same spirit: freedom, equality, dignity, and peace form the shared moral architecture of Canada.
None of these values cancel each other. They coexist, like harmonies in one song. There is room to merge them into one simple truth: we can live well if we strive to love one another, practice empathy, and stand firm against the lie that compassion is weakness.
If we remember that, and if we live it even imperfectly, the hum will begin to quiet. The siren can rest. We will listen — long enough to change what we build next.
But the time is now. The urgency is here. As Galadriel warned, “The quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little, and it will fail, to the ruin of all.”
The hum was never the problem. We just forgot how to listen through it.
If this hits, share in the comments what you’re learning to listen for.