While the rest of the world is ho-ho-ho-ing, I’ve been oh-no-no-ing, pounding out what the friend who advised me to write them calls “anger chapters.” Lately, I’m on this path of inquiry into absolutely everything, and now it’s anger’s turn. You see, I don’t usually get very far with anger. Most of the time, I start out ranting and after a few moments, I crack myself up. It feels silly and juvenile to be blaming others so energetically for whatever ails me. I tend to get a sort of cartoony mental image, something like a mouse pounding on the vast armored doors of a fortress. (Or a scene from Frank Capra, an exhausted Jimmy Stewart confronting the massive barriers of an intransigent political system.)
Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this may be a defense against emotions I don’t wish to feel. For one thing, I’m not a mouse, and that self-depiction of utter powerlessness is unlikely to be much help on my journey. For another, quite a few wise people believe that psychological benefit attaches to expressing anger, even if only to oneself. I can’t say I have a firm grip on their point. Beyond the relief of discharging whatever has been suppressed, they hint at increased understanding and compassion, a connection I am still trying to make. In the anger chapters, eyes-only writings, I am allowing those feelings to pour forth without self-censorship.
Something is emerging, and I want to share it with you.
Life at school was awful for me, as I suppose it still is for kids who are odd, foreign, brainy or otherwise singled out for the disapprobation of their peers. After-school TV specials suggest it may be different today (I hope so), but in the ancient history of my own childhood, no one took any notice or made any gesture to ameliorate my misery. Back in the Baby Boom, the beleaguered teachers and administrators I encountered left it to the feral community of children to work out their own playground laws and pecking-orders. Some of these authority figures were fresh from school themselves and—I now see in the newsreels of my mind’s eye—must have had their own unconscious reasons to make friends with the little tyrants and give the little pariahs a wide berth. If home life had been tolerable, if I had been less afraid of punishment, I might have been a truant. But at least at school I got to read and draw, and to stay out of my family’s clutches for many hours a day.
I endured, and as I endured, I imagined how things might be made better. I didn’t have the words or concepts to express it, but I sensed that secondary things like order, efficiency, compliance and quietude took precedence over what truly mattered, such as the actually existing children’s experience and needs. When I read Paul Goodman’s great book, Growing Up Absurd, now a half-century old, I understood:
We live increasingly, then, in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, procedure, prestige, and profit. We don’t get the shelter and education because not enough mind is paid to those things. Naturally the system is inefficient; the overhead is high; the task is rarely done with love, style, and excitement, for such beauties emerge only from absorption in real objects; sometimes the task is not done at all; and those who could do it best become either cynical or resigned.
(You can download a PDF of this singular book from the Internet Archive. If you have never read it, you owe it to yourself.)
Of course, other truths co-exist: exceptional teachers and administrators struggle against the weight of the system every day, and sometimes win. (Here’s one who’s offering his ebook, Teaching as an Act of Love, for free.) We shrink from condemning the system because we don’t want to cheapen the heroism of such individuals. But when we lock our anger away, when we treat a bad educational system as merely in need of a tweak here and there, it has the effect of promoting acceptance, of normalizing, what should be rebuked because it should be remade.
In the little world of family as in the big world of social institutions, a chief defense of transgressors is just this type of normalization. When I was old enough to speak up for myself, I asked my mother why she had allowed certain things to happen. She said, “I don’t know what you’re making such a big deal about. I see families worse than us in the movies all the time.” That’s always been good for a laugh, and the laugh has made it easy to dismiss. But high and low, the first line of response to whistle-blowers is to make them feel they are over-reacting, that whatever has driven them to rise up is merely ordinary, and that the fault is in themselves rather than whatever or whomever they have denounced.
I have no desire to live in the past. When I’m done writing the anger chapters, very soon, I expect to learn what I can and close the book, reserving new anger for the fresh affronts life is sure to bring. But I now understand that all the times I blocked my anger at family or at school or later in life with laughter and a shrugging acknowledgment that what’s past cannot be changed have contributed to the normalization, the acceptance, of what should never have been treated as normal in the first place.
And so it is in our public discourse.
There’s plenty of a certain type of rebuke around, to be sure. On the political right, vitriol is the style of the day: Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, name-calling and scapegoating ad nauseum. Among liberals and progressives, though, several factors have converged to defuse our anger, and I am beginning to see that the cost we pay is high.
The heyday of sixties activism was characterized by a clear-sighted anger, keenly aware of the inherent absurdities of the system, a kind of holographic anger that saw through superficial differences in the academy, the corporation, the bureaucracy and other manifestations of the power elite to the bones of an unjust order masquerading as true democracy. In part because so many activists were young and hadn’t yet learned to moderate the expression of feelings, the anger often burst forth in extreme, absurd or outrageous actions and statements.
From the reaction to this we began to learn that between feeling something and expressing it, there exists freedom of choice, a good thing. By now, growing numbers of people who wish to bring this nation’s collective actions more in line with principles of pluralism, participation and equity have understood that the outward expression of anger often triggers defense in the very people we wish to persuade. Indeed, we are beginning to see that baroque depictions of how bad things are tend to produce demoralization, which leads to inaction. Little by little, we are learning that the most powerful spur to change is the prospect of our own feasible actions making a difference. And all of that is sensible and good.
But inadvertently, this learning process also gave aid and comfort to the opponents of social justice. Forty or more years on, they are still able to dismiss progressives’ expression of anger as a sort of juvenile acting-out (“Sounds like he’s stuck in the sixties”), or to slather it with an even older taint (“Sounds like old-style class warfare”). And those dismissals still tend to stick.
The effect of muting expressions of righteous anger is to constrict our vocabulary of response to the absurd and the appalling. Actions that should evoke outrage are discussed—rationalized, tweaked, negotiated and accepted—as if they were within the scope of ordinary, acceptable human behavior.
I am not advocating anger as a political tactic to persuade opponents, or clinging to old anger as a personal life-path. But along with love, anger is an engine of activism, a star by which to navigate. Not all political speech exists for the purpose of persuasion. Sometimes it is necessary to say what we see, for the benefit of anyone who has ears to hear it.
When I got to the anger chapter on politics, I began to rant about the politicians and manufacturers who trade others’ well-being for personal power or wealth (or sometimes, pathetically and contemptibly, just for proximity to, for the illusion of, these things). Bob Dylan’s song “Masters of War” (also almost a half-century old) came into my mind. Nothing can express more powerfully the anger I feel at $73 billion of our national commonwealth being spent in Afghanistan this year, at knowing this sum is only one-tenth of the funding allocated last year to bail out banks and corporations who, upon receiving taxpayers’ largesse, failed to increase needed lending but used the money to shore up their own profits, and at knowing that our President has so far normalized these appalling realities as to respond with a straight face to massive unemployment by saying “our resources are limited.”
It’s just a song, people. I challenge you to read the lyrics all the way through, noticing whatever feelings arise in your body and mind, without resisting or bailing before you have reached the end. If it’s not easy, then take some time before year’s end to ask yourself, as I have been doing, where your anger is buried and what you have paid for its loss.
Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain
You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
While the death count gets higher
Then you hide in your mansion
While the young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud
You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins
How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead