The Anger Epidemic

Anger isn't generally a desirable emotion. Some people are terrified of their own anger, afraid they will explode, lose control, say or do something they will regret. My father had this fear of getting angry, probably because his own father had been explosive, especially when drunk, beating him and once, his mother. I never saw my father lose his temper, or not for more than half a minute.

Everyone feels angry at times, when they're rejected, when they don't get their way, when someone says no, when they feel they've been insulted, when they think someone else hasn't respected them or their rights. When they've been pushed around. Some people become pugnacious drunks. Some seem more irascible by nature. Psychology tells us that anger is a normal human reaction. But as a citizen, a member of society, a member of a family, a member of a community, while I can accept anger as natural, I can't call it a positive emotion. Angry people can be very damaging. They cause hurt, which results in the victim hurting them back or hurting someone else. Feeling anger is one thing, but acting out of anger, speaking out of anger, is almost always destructive. Anger isn't something I could ever praise or celebrate. It's something I want to calm, as in "let's see if we can find a way to settle our differences." I don't want to live in a world where everyone is angry at everyone else, and we all think we have a right to be angry. A world like that can only get worse and worse.

The media has a different take on anger though. For the media, anger, violence, rage, out of control behavior are a good story. It's drama, the stuff that the media thrives on, murders, mayhem, shootings, almost as much as major storms and natural disasters. These are subjects that attract viewers, us, we want to watch it. "Americans are angry" has become a good story for lazy journalists, since they can always find angry people to interview. When I was growing up in the '60s, a similar story that got a lot of play was "the generation gap." The premise of that was that parents couldn't understand their kids, kids lived in a completely different world. Everyone believed it, and it didn't help family relationships that we did. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Parents didn't expect to get along with their teenagers, didn't try, same for the kids, and relationships were bad. It's a relief that the more recent story was about the friendships between parents and their kids.

Now the story is anger. The angry American voter, worker, consumer. Story after story appears about how Americans are angry. You get the impression there's no longer such a thing as a rational voter, a reasonable voter, who acknowledges that people of goodwill can disagree on important subjects, that someone who thinks differently from you is not a total moron, or evil. They might even have good ideas and good intentions, and just have drawn different conclusions. It wouldn't be a very gripping news story, rational discussion breaking out among Americans. In the presence of the anger epidemic, is it even possible to have respectful discussions among people with different opinions? It might make more sense to just stand and yell "go Red" and "go Blue" at each other.

The world is awash with angry people with guns, from the Mideast, to North Africa, to the United States. It's more dangerous when they have guns, but there are plenty of angry people who don't have guns. And all these angry people are absolutely convinced that they are right and anyone who disagrees with them or gets in their way is wrong.

Can we have a serious discussion about anger? Not one where there are two political sides, but something deeper, where we think these things through for ourselves. Why do we get angry when someone disagrees with us? Should anger be celebrated, be expressed, acted upon, be repressed? What is its place in our life, our personality? Who do we want to be, want our kids to be? Anger is a natural human emotion, but are there different kinds of anger, is some anger better than other anger, is any anger good? This has always been an important subject, but now more than ever. We are being bombarded with news about angry people. Yet we see people all around us, everyday, who are peaceable, cooperative, kind. Can we talk with each other about important subjects without becoming angry?

I love comments! Please email yours to jpridmore at literaryhistory.com and I will publish.

2/1/2016 by Jan Pridmore