Everywhere you turn, there are folk throwing in their tuppence- worth and bellowing their version of events from the myriad soapboxes available these days.
You can bawl yourself blue on the television, roar your lungs dry on the radio phone-ins, tweet a tirade and berate on a blog until your fingers become calloused stumps.
In the sporting world, the target for much of this angst-ridden fist-shaking is often the governing body. And in domestic golfing circles, the snipers set their sights on the Scottish Golf Union.
Last week, this scribe received a letter from an anonymous gang of "concerned, fee-paying club golfers" which aired a series of financial grievances about the SGU hierarchy. Phrases such as "self-serving bureaucrats" and "aloof, faceless administrators" were tossed about with wild abandon. That's all very well, and everyone is entitled to strong opinions, but it's easy to deliver such sentiments from behind the safety blanket of anonymity.
The main thrust of the gripe concerned the forthcoming appointments of three club development officers as part of a wider plan to bolster golf club membership throughout Scotland and foster long-term growth.
It will not be a simple task. We all know that these are grim times of toil and that a large number of the SGU's 580 affiliated clubs are eking out a hand-to-mouth existence. The glory days for many have long gone. Memberships, both male and female, are on the wane and waiting lists are now about as common a sight as Elvis hurtling into the Cowglen car park on Halley's comet.
At the tailend of 2011, the Whitemoss club in Perthshire fell victim to the golfing grim reaper and his sharpened 3-iron and was forced to close its doors. The site is set to be used for sheep grazing. It was a stark warning and another reminder to clubs that they need to adapt, refocus and become more flexible in the face of change.
It's not all doom and gloom. Yes, those taking up adult male memberships continues to decline but the drop in numbers was 1.4% in 2010/11 compared to 2.6 % in 2008/09 and 1.9% in 2009/10. Indeed, during the 2010/11 year, some 234 clubs (40.8%) increased their overall adult male membership with 141 of those (24.6%) increasing by 10 members or more.
In the attempts to combat the fall, the SGU has freed up some £½m from built-up reserves to pour into a variety of supporting initiatives over the next three or four years. The aforementioned club development officers are part of this wide-ranging plan. In the past, the SGU has been criticised for ignoring the needs of its member clubs and focusing too much time and energy on developing talent at the "elite" end. Hamish Grey, the chief executive, claims the governing body is now "closer to our clubs than ever before" and you'd like to think that there is now a more considered, joined-up approach to safeguarding the future of the nation's clubs.
Schemes such as the annual Golf Awareness Week and the regular, idea-generating seminars held throughout the country have, by and large, been greeted with enthusiasm from forward-thinking clubs and secretaries who recognise that entrenched and outdated approaches to memberships are simply no longer viable. Our letter writers remained unimpressed, however.
"This money would be better used by paying it back to clubs and helping them through the challenging times," it read. But that is purely a short-sighted, quick fix and not a very good one at that. These "challenging times" are forecast for some time yet. There's no point simply throwing £½m around all the struggling clubs in Scotland as part of a futile, propping-up exercise. You need to try to put in solid foundations for something far more sustainable.
The "concerned, fee-paying club golfers" also made a withering remark about funds being frittered away on "such valuable items as the SGU calendar" and "the fact it contains images of young 'elite' players basking in the January sun in some exotic training camp compounds the annoyance".
It was at this point, that I realised I was probably dealing with those hardened cynics who you often hear grousing about the £10 annual club subscription (it is the third lowest in Europe against an overall average of £26.43) being wasted on the next generation of golfers when, in fact, the warm-weather training exercises are backed by sponsorship, in-kind support and sportscotland funding.
The problem with being a governing body is that you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. There are no easy answers to the challenges facing clubs throughout the country but more open, positive, constructive interaction between them and the top brass can only be beneficial. Grey insists that "our biggest focus in 2012 is on supporting clubs and members." How successful that will be, only time will tell.
