Anger Causes Wide Ripples on the Pond
Catching part of the movie "Crash" last week started me thinking about a phenomenon too many people seem to be experiencing. Anger. Most of us try to mask it, just as most of us probably aren't sure why we're feeling such negative emotion, but it is there all the same, permeating every aspect of our lives.
We also seem to be weighed down by something else, just as debilitating, just as volatile, and just as dangerous. Excess. It is not only possible but highly probably that this excess fuels our anger. In this crass commercial world we’re too willing to indulge, few of us are immune to a subliminal urge to acquire. We now equate acquiring with success, allowing advertisers to carefully persuade us that shopping - acquiring - is a form of entertainment, a mark of stature, a measure of worthiness within the elite of humanity. We’ve learned to ignore the suspicion that a life of excess only compensates for a life of emptiness.
We are that clear, deep and natural pool. Excess is the rock our collective hand tosses into the middle of that pool, and the expanding ripples are the degrees of anger we experience.
In the early days of the ‘women’s movement’ there was a phrase “scratch a woman, find a rage.” Today, that phrase seems to apply to almost everyone. It might be hidden under multiple layers of societal taboos, but many people seem to be angry these days although few could articulate why they’re overcome with such an emotion. Certainly, there are valid reasons for anger in today’s world, but they are elusive and sneaky, wearing us down, causing us to lash out, often in inappropriate ways and at the wrong people or situations.
We’re suffering from a form of endemic helplessness. We’re overstressed from the simple rigors of living. We’re assailed by noise overload from all the electronic gadgets that were supposed to help streamline or simplify our lives. We’re tense in jobs we don’t like but have no where else to go. We’ve found that the mythology we grew up with was either an overt exaggeration or a lie. We have too many extraneous calls on our time - cell phones, fax machines, things beeping, too much traffic, too many people, too little sleep, too much news and not enough information, too many lines to wait in, too little time to seek nutritious food, demands from kids, their schools, their practices, from society, from the tax collector, from bosses, from friends, from having to work harder but not smarter just to make ends meet or keep up appearances.
Our determination and craze to acquire the newest and latest has put us into positions where we are controlled by our appetites rather than controlling them. We do not own our acquisitions, they own us. But – and this is the crux of the problem – we can’t admit that we’ve been had. We can’t admit that all the assurances of being all we can be were nonsense. We can’t admit that the things we believed would bring us happiness have only brought us more turmoil. We’ve accepted that we can’t fight city hall, but we refuse to admit that we aren’t able to fight ourselves.
All that adrenaline, a natural outgrowth of anger, is causing most of us to run away rather than standing to fight, because society, with it’s often absurd and unhealthy strictures, has drummed into us that negative behavior is unacceptable. The conflict is sending us mixed messages, and our response is to ignore it all because trying to figure it all out (when many of us don’t have the tools – intellect, reflection, discipline, desire) would only add another burden and we can’t handle another burden. It’s the old rock and a hard place, damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and simply holding still and really looking inside ourselves is too hard.
Since we either can’t or won’t do anything for ourselves, we look for surrogates or unsatisfactory alternatives or stand-ins just to pretend we’re getting a breather. From a political standpoint, this doesn’t work at all anymore simply because the two main political parties no longer offer a true difference and neither listen to our demands. So why bother? And that stimulates more anger.
Most of us believe we’re already paid our dues many times over, so why should we have to adjust our behavior in any fashion. That may be simply childish belligerence, but it’s also anger talking, too. Now, add all that pent up anger to the ‘isolation’ factor. Who do we talk to about it? What kinds of valves do we have to let off the steam of our discontent? None. Building pressure to conform, to achieve, to acquire, to maintain convinces us we don’t have time to search for an outlet, and that merely causes even more resentment and anger.
Naturally, all this seething turmoil occurs in different people at different points in time which can make previously worthwhile relationships feel stifling or maddening. Since each of us have different choices but most of our choices seem to just get us in more trouble, we grasp at anything that even remotely resembles a way out. We believe a promise from a political party or the current administration that a tax cut will give us more money, or that by invading another country we’ll be safer, or that by sacrificing something today we’ll have a different, ‘happier’ job tomorrow, or by involving ourselves with a different ideology or religion or group or cult or organization we’ll have more fun more often. Something tells us it’s all fairy tales, but we enjoyed fairy tales during childhood, so we try them again, trying not to realize that we’ve merely added another dollop of anger to what is already a toxic mix.
What ultimately happens is that by lowering our head, by plowing on at top speed, by tuning out the sounds and signals on the periphery of our existence, we run headlong into a brick wall. We crash. We will either allow a false assurance of progress to destroy us or we’ll end up in a bloody and ugly revolution that we don’t want but can’t avoid. Even a small hint of the pending outcome makes us even angrier, and we begin to realize we can’t hope to win.
Eventually, we’re not only angry but we’re depressed, as well. And the ripples on the pond just keep growing.
We also seem to be weighed down by something else, just as debilitating, just as volatile, and just as dangerous. Excess. It is not only possible but highly probably that this excess fuels our anger. In this crass commercial world we’re too willing to indulge, few of us are immune to a subliminal urge to acquire. We now equate acquiring with success, allowing advertisers to carefully persuade us that shopping - acquiring - is a form of entertainment, a mark of stature, a measure of worthiness within the elite of humanity. We’ve learned to ignore the suspicion that a life of excess only compensates for a life of emptiness.
We are that clear, deep and natural pool. Excess is the rock our collective hand tosses into the middle of that pool, and the expanding ripples are the degrees of anger we experience.
In the early days of the ‘women’s movement’ there was a phrase “scratch a woman, find a rage.” Today, that phrase seems to apply to almost everyone. It might be hidden under multiple layers of societal taboos, but many people seem to be angry these days although few could articulate why they’re overcome with such an emotion. Certainly, there are valid reasons for anger in today’s world, but they are elusive and sneaky, wearing us down, causing us to lash out, often in inappropriate ways and at the wrong people or situations.
We’re suffering from a form of endemic helplessness. We’re overstressed from the simple rigors of living. We’re assailed by noise overload from all the electronic gadgets that were supposed to help streamline or simplify our lives. We’re tense in jobs we don’t like but have no where else to go. We’ve found that the mythology we grew up with was either an overt exaggeration or a lie. We have too many extraneous calls on our time - cell phones, fax machines, things beeping, too much traffic, too many people, too little sleep, too much news and not enough information, too many lines to wait in, too little time to seek nutritious food, demands from kids, their schools, their practices, from society, from the tax collector, from bosses, from friends, from having to work harder but not smarter just to make ends meet or keep up appearances.
Our determination and craze to acquire the newest and latest has put us into positions where we are controlled by our appetites rather than controlling them. We do not own our acquisitions, they own us. But – and this is the crux of the problem – we can’t admit that we’ve been had. We can’t admit that all the assurances of being all we can be were nonsense. We can’t admit that the things we believed would bring us happiness have only brought us more turmoil. We’ve accepted that we can’t fight city hall, but we refuse to admit that we aren’t able to fight ourselves.
All that adrenaline, a natural outgrowth of anger, is causing most of us to run away rather than standing to fight, because society, with it’s often absurd and unhealthy strictures, has drummed into us that negative behavior is unacceptable. The conflict is sending us mixed messages, and our response is to ignore it all because trying to figure it all out (when many of us don’t have the tools – intellect, reflection, discipline, desire) would only add another burden and we can’t handle another burden. It’s the old rock and a hard place, damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and simply holding still and really looking inside ourselves is too hard.
Since we either can’t or won’t do anything for ourselves, we look for surrogates or unsatisfactory alternatives or stand-ins just to pretend we’re getting a breather. From a political standpoint, this doesn’t work at all anymore simply because the two main political parties no longer offer a true difference and neither listen to our demands. So why bother? And that stimulates more anger.
Most of us believe we’re already paid our dues many times over, so why should we have to adjust our behavior in any fashion. That may be simply childish belligerence, but it’s also anger talking, too. Now, add all that pent up anger to the ‘isolation’ factor. Who do we talk to about it? What kinds of valves do we have to let off the steam of our discontent? None. Building pressure to conform, to achieve, to acquire, to maintain convinces us we don’t have time to search for an outlet, and that merely causes even more resentment and anger.
Naturally, all this seething turmoil occurs in different people at different points in time which can make previously worthwhile relationships feel stifling or maddening. Since each of us have different choices but most of our choices seem to just get us in more trouble, we grasp at anything that even remotely resembles a way out. We believe a promise from a political party or the current administration that a tax cut will give us more money, or that by invading another country we’ll be safer, or that by sacrificing something today we’ll have a different, ‘happier’ job tomorrow, or by involving ourselves with a different ideology or religion or group or cult or organization we’ll have more fun more often. Something tells us it’s all fairy tales, but we enjoyed fairy tales during childhood, so we try them again, trying not to realize that we’ve merely added another dollop of anger to what is already a toxic mix.
What ultimately happens is that by lowering our head, by plowing on at top speed, by tuning out the sounds and signals on the periphery of our existence, we run headlong into a brick wall. We crash. We will either allow a false assurance of progress to destroy us or we’ll end up in a bloody and ugly revolution that we don’t want but can’t avoid. Even a small hint of the pending outcome makes us even angrier, and we begin to realize we can’t hope to win.
Eventually, we’re not only angry but we’re depressed, as well. And the ripples on the pond just keep growing.
posted by kaz at 2:41 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home