I read this column this morning and just couldn't resist posting it. I've been wondering lately about how different anger reactions may be affecting the differences in attitudes we see. I have long recognized that I don't understand anger and I, therefore, tend to relegate it to the "addles the brain" department. There's a lot of anger around right not. I'm just amazed at how much general nastiness I see hereabouts, particularly given the season of the year. Anyway, I found the column interesting and relevant to the current issue of blasphemy and how we deal with it.
Karen
Go Ahead -- Get Angry
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, December 18, 2001; Page A27
I got into an argument recently with a woman who had the temerity to differ with me. I sensed my voice rising and my face flushing. "Why are you so angry?" she asked. "I AM NOT ANGRY!" I cleverly averred, fearing that to concede anger is to also concede loss of control and, of course, defeat.
Now, though, I not only admit to anger, I proclaim it and feel good about it. This is the anger directed at Osama bin Laden and anyone else who would do us harm. I do not see them merely as an entity called "the enemy" -- as I did, for example, the Soviet Union -- but as people I truly hate and want to punish. What bothers me is that some people do not see things the same way.
I hear, overhear and talk to these people all the time. I read about them in the press and see them interviewed on television. They are oh-so judicious. They are calm. They use phrases like "in the long term" and they talk about where the United States went wrong and how the response to anger -- in this case, murder -- cannot be anger itself. An eye for an eye and pretty soon everyone is blind, they say. I'd like to pop 'em one.
I refer you now to an article in the Los Angeles Times of Dec. 3. It is about anger -- and about how many people now feel it intensely and are quite surprised, sometimes upset, by it. The article is wonderfully liberating. "Contrary to some common depictions, anger is not a state of reckless confusion," it said. "In its raw form, it is a sensation of power and clarity that gives us the will and energy to fight for our lives."
Clarity is precisely what I feel. In a complicated, on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand world, in an era when science and common sense have robbed us of the absolutes of religious dogma, it is downright invigorating to feel an anger so pure and so justified that time itself has diluted it not one bit. I hate bin Laden so much that when some people said they hated him even more after seeing him on the latest videotape, I wondered how they could. My anger is pressed to the floor already.
So I applaud whenever George Bush utters one of his dead-or-alive pronouncements. But when that happens, I hear others upbraid him for his supposed childishness, his John Wayne pose. These people are invariably on the political left, where I happen to find myself some of the time, and I wonder why they don't share my attitude. I wonder, in fact, why for so long anger has been associated with the political right.
It was Ronald Reagan, you will recall, who brought a moral clarity to the Cold War. He didn't just disagree with communism, he hated it. His anger at times was palpable. Those on the left found that frightening, because they shared no such anger and feared it would lead to a loss of control. But as that L.A. Times article says, anger and loss of control are not synonymous. We survived the Reagan years. Look it up.
In a way, anger has gotten a bad rap. The angriest national leader of our epoch was probably Hitler. He was often seen ranting and raving, pounding his fist, making threats. The consequences of his anger are familiar to all -- images from the Holocaust that cannot be erased from our mind.
But that anger -- maybe rage is a better word -- while deeply felt and often sincere, was bogus in genesis. The "enemy" was really not the enemy. In the case of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals or Slavs, not only were they not a threat but they were innocent of what they were being blamed for. This was an anger born of racial and ethnic hatred.
So maybe in some minds anger is a fascistic phenomenon and to be feared on that account. Maybe others see it as a male characteristic -- muscle in the service of rage and therefore a threat to women. Still others may see it as antithetical to reason itself -- an emotion that, like drugs, addles the brain.
But as for myself and countless other Americans, our anger is so pure, so clean, so clearly the product of what was done to us, that to shame us for it mocks our humanity. It comes not from our insecurities or failings but from what is best in all of us -- sorrow for the dead, sympathy for the grieving, concern for the future and love of our country. I feel no shame -- but I would if, after what happened, I felt no anger at all.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company |
