There’s so much anger flying around these days.
Not just the everyday fighting-for-parking-spaces or snapping-at-your-kids-in-public stuff. More like professional anger, anger that is cultivated and honed, anger that is valued as an asset and a skill.
People who can be eloquently angry, stylishly irate or perpetually perturbed can make a career out of it. Not just a career of threatening to anger-blast well-heeled corporations unless they give you a big check to be a “consultant” or “community liaison”; it seems like the new game is anger that never abates, anger that just moves from one issue to the next with equal engagement and intensity, anger that is lucrative not as a threat, but as a terribly effective, terribly destructive tool.
Nothing wrong with getting mad when the situation calls for it, especially if it helps resolve the problem, but so much is lost when anger becomes part of a person’s identity or part of the identity of a group of people.
Perhaps anger has become equated with intelligence, a concept given root on college campuses where challenging authority is encouraged while accepting conventionality is seen as weak, lazy and uncool. Write a paper taking down a cherished touchstone of the community and get an A.
It is also the current zeitgeist. Anger is currency. Anger is power. Everyone is aggrieved. Rich people are mad that they have to pay for the welfare of poor people. Poor people are mad that money equals so many things, like status, power, legitimacy and choice. The middle class is angry that America no longer seems to play by its own rules.
In our times it takes anger to move mountains, make headlines, get people to pay attention. An inflammatory social media post often gets more “likes” than happy vacation pics or inspirational sayings. It takes anger to let the world know that you’re important.
It takes anger to be taken seriously. Look at Gov. David Ige. His image would probably improve if, just once, he got passionately furious. His lamentable track record of actually getting something done might also improve if he got mad, not just passive-aggressive, and made people get busy. Anger is a useful tool in an emotional toolbox that is filled with other useful options.
But when everybody is screaming mad, what actual positive changes are made?
This quote is included in Mary Kawena Pukui’s “Olelo Noeau” collection of Hawaiian proverbs:
Nau ke ku‘i, lohi ka lima — The direct translation is given as, “When one grinds the teeth, the hand slows,” meaning that anger makes the work take longer and gets in the way of progress.
At this point in time, the emotional calibration is so warped that things that aren’t angry are criticized for being vapid, and things that are infused with anger are admired. The emotional center is missing. Things that should just roll off our shoulders set us off while we shrug at things that should make us mad.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
