I found Richard Cohen's article on anger very apt and powerful. It points to an important truth about our contemporary culture. We are not very comfortable with anger, and we often try to reason our way around it; anger embarrasses us, and to "give in to it" is seen as a profound personal failure. This is assuredly a Good Thing most of the time. But has the habit of equivocating, of suppressing anger, of sublimating and channelling it into "more constructive" avenues than violence become so deeply ingrained that it impedes decisive action when it may be necessary? Does our quest to understand our base instincts and motivations and our consciousness of moral complexity deter us from perceiving stark moral simplicity when it arises? Is there, in fact, a "culture of inaction" rather than a "culture of violence?" I don't know, but there's a lot of evidence for it.
Cohen's point is that there is something exhilarating about being faced, for once, with a clearly unequivocal situation. He cites this LA Times article which describes anger as a "sensation of power and clarity that gives us the will and energy to fight for our lives," and writes:
Clarity is precisely what I feel. In a complicated, on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand world, in an era when science and common sense have robbed us of the absolutes of religious dogma, it is downright invigorating to feel an anger so pure and so justified that time itself has diluted it not one bit. I hate bin Laden so much that when some people said they hated him even more after seeing him on the latest videotape, I wondered how they could. My anger is pressed to the floor already. So I applaud whenever George Bush utters one of his dead-or-alive pronouncements.
Cohen's piece is a kind of paean to anger. It's view you don't hear too often.
The LA Times article he cites, by the way, is worth a look in its own right. The title ("Letting Anger Seep Out") and the source (the paper's health writer) might deter but it's actually quite good.
In a way it's a different angle on the phenomenon Lefty confusion, break-down, and re-alignment that I keep harping on, depicting various mushy, touchy-feely, NPR-types getting in touch with their inner bellicosity.
For Glenn, the Catholic peace activist in Nebraska, the turmoil of recent months has prompted a rethinking of the principles that have defined her life."When it's a matter of self-preservation, I think we need to ask ourselves when it's OK to harm others," she said. While Glenn has not abandoned her commitment to peace, she says she won't march in local demonstrations against the operation in Afghanistan.
"If I'm going to stand somewhere with a sign that says, 'peace now,' I want it to say: 'stop using planes as weapons; stop using anthrax--peace now.' If there's a madman shooting people in McDonald's, do we have a rally outside saying, 'peace now'?"