You Wanna See Real Anger?

Careful What We Wish For

What the hell is going on here?
Took my living and you took my friends
This is a time-bomb and it can happen anywhere
It could happen right here
It could happen to you too

What if it was in your backyard?
What if it was your way of life?
I bet you'd go crazy too
I bet you'd lose your mind too

A lot of people are on the edge
Found the edge a long time ago
You wanna see real anger
You wanna see your sorrow
But the good thing is
We've got to bring the love
And we can't let go and we can't give up

Great Lake Swimmers “Ballad of a Fisherman’s Wife” (Listen to the song here)

I hear and see a lot of distress from people who are plugged into the news cycles. Mostly, and as much as I am able, I am not. While I have absolutely nothing to say about the actual content of the national news, I find I have plenty of observations about the effect it is having. Many people in the circles I most often swim in are very agitated and very worried. Every day, there seem to be portents that point to the rise of a fascist regime, or the collapse of social safety nets that (kind of, not really) supported the most vulnerable people in our country. Just three weeks ago I was supposed to be focusing my worry and attention on the wildfires in California, and now I'm supposed to worry about the mass layoffs of government workers and the way in which Russia’s dictator may soon become ours as well. I am entirely unclear how my worrying helps any of these situations, but that's the clear message I'm getting from lots of directions.

I don't mean to make light of these things, nor am I denying that behind some of the stories there is real human suffering or signs of real fascism rising. I also don’t intend any judgment of any other person and how we each choose to deal with this onslaught. As with everything I write, I’m writing about what I see as much to tell myself as to tell you. I am trying to point out that the stories that come to us by way of invading our minds and hearts through insidious media streaming are causing real damage and have for a long time. With the rise of screens everywhere, doom and woe are ready to leap into your soul through your eyes at any moment that you glance at a device.

I think it's entirely possible, given the decay of our social consensus and the mass addiction to our chosen media sources that pretend to supply us with “facts”, that we are in for some hard times. On the other hand, maybe not. There is really no way to tell and I admit that can feel scary, since many of us also use the news to comfort us that “Everything is OK”, which is just as false. This does not mean that I am not prepared to join the protest, or even civil disobedience when the situation seems to call for it. But I question the fraught emotional landscape that currently prevails, and has prevailed for my entire life, only increasing in intensity. I've previously written about the fact that if the media has you glued to their streaming fear-and-indignation supply, then they've got you right where they want you. They've got you equally pinned if you are cheering for the events they are portraying; or if you are watching and breathing sighs of relief because “the worst hasn’t happened…yet”. As long as they keep you watching, they’ve got you. This is why the news outlets, despite whether they seem to support or oppose him, salivate over our current president. He's the most entertaining fool we've had yet. He keeps everyone on both sides jonesing for more. The third way between these dualistic extremes, of course, is to just stop watching and try to direct your attention to real things. Real things are those that you can have affection for and relationship with. This is why I see such genius when Jesus tells us to focus our life and faith practices on our neighbors, because it's only our neighbors that are really real. (My definition of “neighbors” is the same as Wendell Berry’s: the people, animals, trees, grasses, air, waters, and other living (and dying), beings that you rub shoulders with every day, who you depend on, and who depend on you. In other words, all of God’s creatures in your neighborhood). The State and the Corporation will never be as real as our neighbors. But they will never stop trying to convince us that our attention and fears and worries should be trained on them.

In addition to being distraught, many people also seem angry. Some seem vengefully angry, as they gleefully dismantle the government (or appear to do so on the news) and look forward to dancing on its corpse (they will, of course, keep all the elements of government that allow them and their rich friends to continue to receive corporate welfare from all of us). On the other side, people are also angry, but in their case, the anger takes the form of calls to Resist and Defend and Protect the Most Vulnerable. One wonders, however, why we weren't motivated to do these things two months ago. We have had massive poverty and increasing numbers of vulnerable people for many decades in our country and world, under many presidents. I would point to Matthew Desmond's book Poverty By America and simply say, if someone has so clearly demonstrated the simple things we need to do to change policy so that the poor, both urban and rural, are not a defacto slave class from which we all leech, then why haven’t we started that work long ago? Why is there now a crisis? And what can we actually accomplish when we are in crisis mode?

The answer, of course, is we can accomplish nothing when we are running around either destructively or hand-wringingly angry. The current administration knows this, and this is why they keep taking “actions,” so we will keep throwing our hands in the air and crying “the fascists are coming” or “death to the Deep State”.

I've long understood that we have a society that is addicted to apocalyptic visions. It explains all the zombie and dystopian movies, of course. This is why when progressives obsess about the Climate Change Disaster, I find their rhetoric remarkably similar to that of fundamentalist Christians and others on the right who are focused on the Rapture and end times. We really do need to be careful. If we continue to imagine the destruction of the world, as most of us who are addicted to the news cycles and/or fundamentalist ideology are almost constantly doing, we just might bring it about.

And this brings me back to anger, and to this beautiful song. I submit that, unless we are actually powerless in a way similar to how the poor are, we simply don't understand what real anger feels like any more, because we've substituted in its place a prideful and reckless or despairing and anxiety-driven futurism for the real thing. Real anger wells up when something actually happens to us or our loved ones…not when we are imagining something happening.

Anthony Dekker of Great Lake Swimmers wrote the lyrics to the above song upon hearing about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. He listened to a woman who lived there spill out her raw anger to a news reporter. The title and lyrics tell it all: she is a fisherman’s wife, and because of the “regrettable accident”, their already extremely tenuous existence is now completely destroyed. They had very little, but they loved it. And now they have nothing.

Look at the lyrics of that song again, and perhaps listen to it. Rather than voyeuristically looking into the life of a stranger in distress (as we do all the time on the news to feed our addiction to apocalyptic visions) try to imagine, please; try to imagine being in her place, imagine with your heart: Can you feel the anguish this woman carries, as she pours out her enraged soul to whomever is listening? She’s been pushed to the absolute brink, and right off the edge. Her husband’s livelihood has been wiped away by the greed and carelessness of a humongous oil company. She was powerless to prevent it, and she has no way to keep it from happening again in the future. This is the first and the last thing, it is the only thing. She has had it. She is furious.

Anger is when you are pushed over the edge, when a real boundary has been crossed. Anger in its right role might protect us and those we care about, although in the case of the fisherman’s wife the anger is about what she has already lost and cannot now protect. This immediately gives the lie to the false fantasy that feeds our exploitative armaments industry, that we could ever truly protect ourselves from harm through the industrial violence of bombs, drones, missiles and guns; or that we will be able to protect our exploitative way of life through walls or tariffs (or “free trade” which we all understand now just means forcing our way into new markets for cheap workers). All of these things will only make us responsible for ruining countless other lives as we insulate ourselves from feeling anything real at all. Hot or cold, war is a zero sum game that grows from fear of the Other.

Much like what I wrote about Fear awhile back, I see Anger in our popular discourse being harnessed and mined and twisted into a Death Wish, on both sides. If we are honest, many of us caught up in both Left and Right secretly (or not so secretly) are desiring the destruction of the world, because at least then we will have been proved right about all of our worries.

This is not true anger. True anger, as the song beautifully expresses, flows from love, and when the anger has passed (because we can't keep up true anger for very long; by its very nature it is a release)...more love flows from it. This is because real anger proves to us what is really important, so important that we are entirely lost without it.

And that is why I can’t muster a single ounce of indignation or real anger toward the current President and his idiotic antics. He is signing pieces of paper and making waves simply to draw attention, poke the bear and feed the beast. And the beast is lapping it up, and we are all part of that beast. If you add on top of that our addiction to the usury money economy to this mix, the beast is roaring with insatiable hunger.

It’s possible, reading this, that you might be getting angry at me right now. How can you not care about what's clearly going on, you might say? And I admit, I fear that this post will be misunderstood to mean that I’m advising we all put our heads in the sand. I don't want to have my head in the sand, I really don’t. But I also don’t want to have my mind and heart coerced and co-opted, which we all now understand is exactly what the internet has been designed to do. I've studied the deep illness that I see in our nation and world, and in me, for a long time, and I try to write about aspects of it here, with compassion for myself and others. Although I don’t understand what is actually happening in the highest echelons (and neither, I contend, does anyone else, not even the people who are there) , I've seen it grow and fester under every president I've ever lived through, Democrat and Republican. If this current administration is proving anything to us, it is that we've allowed the government and the media to be a stand-in for our real lives for far too long. We have allowed actors and buffoons to entertain and placate us, to rev us up over and over again so that We, the Good Guys can keep fighting against Them, the Bad Guys, so that the Good Guys can once again control the levers of power. But all the while both sides are always enlarging the imagined divide, always keeping us ever more plugged in, always driving us to futilely wish that someday, what we see on the screen will be cathartic victory over the Devil.

Real anger transforms. It is a boundary that says What the Hell? and then lets loose. It is a release. Whatever is building up in our society is not true anger, it is more like obsessive distancing, non-stop Othering. It is war. Like all addictions, it involves real destruction both without and within, and we’d better find a path to sobriety to avoid that. The longer we all plug into the news circus, the more passive and controllable and combustible we will become. Frenzied activity is not the antidote for passivity. We will get more January Sixths, and it doesn’t matter what side perpetrates it. It will do no good. Unlike real anger, it will create more waves of incoherence. . . and then, in the aftermath, nothing new. No recognition, no love.

The time may come for real anger. So, I say to myself regularly, and I also suggest to you: Stay connected to your neighborhoods and your neighbors. Try to unplug . . .and then when you get pulled in, try again. Stop worrying for worrying’s sake about an imagined disaster or hoping for an imagined Better World. These are both panaceas and drugs. The way to prepare for the entirely uncertain future is simply to be doing what we should have been doing all along. If we unplug and use our love and anger to get to work learning how to live with each other, without the news cycles and constant consuming, we might even prevent an apocalypse. Let's stop playing right into the hands of the media monster that would prefer to keep us drugged up and strung out, so we have nothing to draw from when it's time to be really pissed off.

My prayer is: Keep calm everybody, but don't just carry on. Protect your anger. Don’t continue to listen to the comedians or pundits that make you feel like at least the people who tune in with you to watch your chosen person are sane. Don’t look at memes. Don’t allow yourself to think you actually understand any of it better than anyone else. Don’t let your heart get pulled into either pride or despair. Instead, double down on loving everything and everyone you have that is real: your family, your yards or other patches of ground in your care, your parks, your neighbors, your churches, your faith practices, your schools, and hopefully, your work. Fill your imagination with visions of a good life lived in communion with your neighbors, because there is no other life. Love it all every day, which will be its own reward. And also, love it so that when outside forces, whatever their party affiliation, try to take it from you and your neighbors, or twist it for some Cause, you will get angry enough to say No!! In saying No, you will either find a way to subvert and repel them, or you will go down with the ship. Either way your heart will be whole. Then even more love can flow. We'd better love our real neighbors fiercely, more than any Cause, no matter how we all voted, or didn’t vote at all. The dissolution of the illusion that is happening in government and corporate spectacles and debacles can be a wake up call to us all that, as long as we keep watching and feeding it, it’s never going to stop. There never was any chance of Hope & Change or Making Anything Great at the levels of government nor industry nor finance. We have always had the power to make our own lives, but only in the context of that which we love. If we learn to Love our Real Lives and Our Neighbors Again (try putting that on a hat), we will know when to get really angry, because we will know what we really love.

PS. I want to say that this post mostly amounts to a restatement of the ideas of Wendell Berry, and to a lesser extent, Charles Eisenstein, which I’ve written about many times before. I owe so much to them both for helping me climb out of my addictions. As I said above, this post is really me asking myself, “Is it still true, even in these conditions?” Yes, it is.

PPS. Here’s how the song ends,accompanied by an awesome banjo solo, I might add (I hope this makes you want to listen to it):

You better hurry up and know it, I'm gonna love you till the end of the line.
You better hurry up and know it, I'm gonna love you till the end of the line.
You better hurry up and know it, I'm gonna love you till the end of the line.

This an old postcard photo of the village of Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon, which is profiled in the book The Banality of Good and Evil, a book I read in seminary and which has been another inspiration for this post. By the time World War II was over, the collective efforts of the people in Le Chambon had sheltered nearly 5000 Jews and other refugees from the Nazis and the French Vichy government. Asked afterward why they did so, no one was able to really explain it other than by saying “it was the right thing to do.” Read more about that here.