Anger

“Do You Do Well to Be Angry?”

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anger-1007186_1280“Do you do well to be angry?”

It’s a question God asks the pouting prophet Jonah sitting outside Nineveh, angry with God for sparing this city, Israel’s arch enemy. It’s a question we may well ask ourselves.

Yet another mass shooting resulting in the serious wounding of a senator and several others and the death of the 66 year old shooter, underscores the danger of unchecked anger. He called the President a “traitor” on social media, had been involved in a variety of angry altercations, and was deeply dissatisfied with the way things were going in the country.

Truthfully, he’s not so different from many, except that he made the fatal transition from anger to violence. We seem to live in a society with many angry people. It is dangerous to challenge rude or reckless behavior in a public setting. You could find yourself in a gunfight without even a knife.

Why are we so angry? I wonder if some of it is that everything from advertising to our schools suggest to us that we are the center of the universe and that we should fulfill all our longings. Reality doesn’t work like that. We share the planet with 7 billion other people. Maturity often calls upon us to live with unfulfilled desires. Yet we believe no one should get in our way on the road or delay us even a minute or two when we are running late for work or another scheduled event.

I also wonder if we are angry because we spend too much time listening to angry and inflammatory voices. Online pundits and much of the new media build their followings around arousing and feeding their following, no matter what the political persuasion. At times it can be quite entertaining, and then there is the twist, the inflammatory accusation, or even the suggest that the world would be a better place without X.

Most of us have enough of a sense of proportion to just laugh at this, or even the good sense to change the channel. But a steady diet of this can take its toll, kind of like too much refined sugar. Combined with personal frustrations and perhaps a sense of inadequacy, and inflammatory rhetoric ceases to be a laughing matter.

All this emphasizes how important it is to teach our children, and ourselves how to act constructively with our anger. We all experience anger, but the trick is figuring out how to use it constructively. The apostle Paul put it this way: “Be angry yet do not sin, do not let the sun set on your anger.” Yes we do get angry, but it doesn’t have to end badly. You can write that letter to your congressperson, propose that compromise with a co-worker you don’t see eye to eye with. Maybe going for a walk, a run, or digging your garden gives you time to work off the adrenaline and get some perspective.

Paul also makes a good observation, that anger is best when it is a brief moment, rather than a way of life. It is when it festers and grows bitter that it can become lethal. Anger is a place we are all going to visit, but none of us should live there.

So we might ask, “do we do well to be angry?” And with this, we might also ask, do we do well to arouse another’s anger, and to feed a lingering, free-floating sense of anger at the world, toward a particular group of people, a particular party?

It’s not just for ourselves that we might ask these things. It is also for those most vulnerable to giving way to anger. Contrary to the angry Cain’s question, we are our brother’s (and sister’s) keeper. While I think people are responsible for their own anger, I would not want to be the one to help ratchet up the anger of another.

“Do you do well to be angry?”

Outrage and the Speech of Freedom

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By David Shankbone – David Shankbone CC BY – SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3554956

“Why are we so angry?”

That’s a question I’ve been musing on of late.

My Facebook friends are a curious phenomena of my life. I find some expressing outrage against anything that might be associated with the political left. And then there are others equally outraged with anything associated with the political right. It makes me kind of glad that they only meet on my newsfeed! It also makes me wonder what it says about me that I have friends at both these extremes.

Some suggest that outrage with the political establishment explains the attraction of people to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Whether or not these are the best candidates for president, it concerns me that outrage might outweigh more measured judgments of who should serve in this important office.

I come back to my question of “why are we so angry?”

Outrage is defined as “an extremely strong reaction of anger, shock, or indignation.” I wonder what feeds the anger that shows up in road rage, gun violence, and the vitriolic discourse that increasingly seems to be the social and popular media norm.

I do wonder at time about the capacity of our media to ratchet up our anger as one angry voice augments another, with media personalities egging this on because it means more views to a blog, a talk show, or “news” program. One study suggests that “anger is the internet’s most powerful emotion.”

Could this be one reason why we are so angry?

While expressions of outrage may well be protected free speech, I do wonder whether any of this promotes what I call the speech of freedom–the speech whose aim is to promote the common good of both speaker and those with whom they disagree. It seems to me that all outrage does is solidify my bond with those who share my anger while alienating me further from any who see things differently.

Maybe that’s what some of us want. But I kind of wonder how healthy a community is that is formed around anger. And I think we have to ask ourselves whether we really want to keep fostering the antagonisms that our media seem bent on ratcheting up. Do we really want a world that is divided into winners and losers, a zero sum game? There are many parts of the world that operate like that. By and large, they are brutal, vengeful places where victory and tragedy are never far apart.

Can anger ever be useful? The apostle Paul once wrote, “be angry but do not sin, do not let the sun set on your anger.” I’ve come to realize that anger is a sign, and to ask what that is a sign of, and to act quickly to address the source of my anger. Sometimes, it is simply that a selfish desire has been frustrated, and it may be useful to hold up the mirror and see what this is showing me about myself.

Sometimes, we are angry because of some injustice or grievance that breaks a relationship. I can stew and build resentment, or I can go, before the sun sets, and say, “we need to talk, because this endangers our relationship.” It’s not always possible to work out differences in a day–the issue is not letting them fester. There is an incredible freedom that comes when anger turns to forgiveness and reconciliation.

What about social media and other things that ratchet up anger? I wonder if it is really worthwhile giving attention to these things. What if we took the time we spent posting and reading angry rants to writing a letter to our political representatives on something we care about? What about spending the time volunteering in something we care about? What about having a conversation with a living person with a different point of view–face to face! And for people of faith, what about taking the time we would spend reading and writing things against a person to pray for them. Praying for those in public leadership is commanded in the Bible–attacking them in social media is not!

All these may be ways to turn anger into the speech of freedom.

I began this post with the question of “why are we so angry?” There is a slight twist to that question in the story of Jonah, when Jonah is pouting because God spared the powerful city of Nineveh. God asks Jonah, “do you do well to be angry?”

Do I do well to be angry? Do you?

Justified Anger

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We usually assume anger is a bad thing, often because it results in bad things–outbursts, hurtful words that cannot be taken back, or even physical violence. Yet even the Bible seems to allow for the possibility of anger that isn’t a bad thing. The apostle Paul says, “In your anger, do not sin: Do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26, NIV). This is anger that is acknowledged and turned into constructive action, not bottled up where it becomes bitterness or explodes in rage.

Twice today I’ve come across the idea of justified anger, both in the contexts of our country’s continuing struggle with racism. The first came up in Edward Gilbreath’s fine new book, Birmingham Revolution, which chronicles the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. leading up to, and following the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Gilbreath discusses the latent anger many African-Americans struggle with in the everyday incidents of racism they continue to experience, whether it is being treated with suspicion in a store, or being stopped by police because one fits a racial profile.

birmingham revolutionFollowing arrest during a civil rights march in Birmingham, King was placed in solitary confinement. A guard, perhaps to increase his displeasure, gave him a copy of the local paper with a letter from eight moderate white clergymen, not opposing civil rights but counselling moderation and “waiting”. This indeed got King’s blood boiling, but he turned this into constructive anger in writing what is perhaps the signature treatise of the civil rights movement. In it, he argues that it is never timely for those who benefit from oppression to face action against it. He also argues against the accusation of law breaking that while just laws must be kept, an unjust law demands to be broken because it is out of harmony with moral law.

The second reference to this idea was in a link I came across of an article by a Madison, Wisconsin pastor, who after a talk to a Rotary group, was approached by one of the audience members praising him for not being an “angry black man”. He responds that he is indeed an “angry black man” because of the difference between the image of Madison as a progressive university community and the realities that he and other African Americans experience in this community. He describes a traffic stop in the parking lot of the church he has pastored for 30 years, even though the car they were looking for was red and his was black and the name on his driver’s license matched the name on the church sign. Meanwhile they talked casually to his white associate while keeping him under suspicion. He goes on the describe other ways African-Americans continue to struggle under the continuing realities of racism and challenges Madison in the ways it can address these.

Reading this, as much as I’d love to identify with King and the Wisconsin pastor, the truth is I’m probably more like those eight white clergymen, preferring caution and moderation. But reading these accounts, I begin to get the anger as I see a people who were forcibly brought to this country and then treated as less than human and systematically denied rights that were equally theirs as citizens and subject to continuing suspicion. At one point, Gilbreath describes King’s angriest moment as a fourteen year old returning to Atlanta on a bus from a speech competition to be profanely ordered by the bus driver to give up his seat and stand for 90 miles so that whites could sit. Rich Nathan, a local Columbus pastor describes in his book Both-And a gathering of black and white pastors. The whites were asked how many of them and discussed with their children where to put their hands if stopped by a policeman. None raised their hands. The same questions was asked the blacks in the room. Every hand went up. That occurred in my city, one that similarly prides itself on its ‘progressiveness’ as a university town and state capital.

I’m tempted to want to run around and say and do all kinds of “virtuous” things. No one likes to face the truth that they are identified with injustice. Maybe the best thing I can do as a start is to realize that as William Gladstone says that “Justice delayed is justice denied.” Maybe the best thing I can do, at least to start is to stop defending and just listen and say, “you do well to be angry.”