We’re Not Managing Anger

Terry H. Schwadron

Oct. 23, 2023

It feels as if the word of the week is Anger.

What else than anger is fueling deep-seated ethnic hatreds in Israel and Gaza or between Ukrainians and Russians. The question should be why the anger is so present that is boils over into attacks that we see as terrorist killings and kidnaps and the brutality of military response — no matter how justified or not the cause?

What else than anger prompted supporters of would-be Speaker of the House Jim Jordan, who was never going to be a unanimous choice even for his party, to launch vulgar, to make threatening calls to the families of fellow Republicans who dared to oppose his failed candidacy for the job? Indeed, what but anger, personal and political, had fueled the overthrow of Kevin McCarthy as speaker, starting this entire set of falling dominoes that leaves us nine days before funds for a federal government to expire without the ability for the House to act? Why shouldn’t we all be angry that having failed, Jordan and Republicans cannot acknowledge that they are not helping?

It is anger in military and political skirmishes at home and abroad that is fomenting protests of real and perceived governmental grievances that affect access to jobs, health, education, and immigration? We can see anger of different stripes spreading across the Middle East, across Europe, in the Argentine presidential election just yesterday.

We’re watching as political candidates, particularly from the Right, seek to stir anger as motivation to organize, vote, and even overthrow election results in the name of some delusional goal of being found to be correct about rising crime or inflationary prices or lack of housing. As people argue about how to protect Israeli or Palestinian civilians, some are so angry in response that they want to silence any voices of would-be dissent at home or abroad. The voices for retribution are much louder than voices for restraint.

Apparently, enough of us prefer chaos to any restraint on anger — even when it graduates from organizing voices to rock-throwing to actual violence against individuals and even to whole nations. Apparently, even when chaos is moving to cancel government altogether, we want to insist that only we are right and that disagreement should spawn anger.

Ignoring The News

The news is so bad, people keep telling me, that they would prefer not to hear about it, as if ignoring reports about what we insist on doing to one another magically will disappear. I think they mean that the news is making us uncomfortable in our human skins, that maintaining this level of daily anger hardly seems healthy or sustainable.

One insult, one slight, builds over time into patterns. Doing nothing guarantees that while one side of each anger depository thinks it is going about its day, the other side of the same issues is feeling more aggrieved.

As humans, we are showing increasingly that we lack both patience for protest and the willingness to hear that we are wrong, whether about attitudes affecting race and identity or gender or perceived national interest. We are hearing more and more calls for enforced isolation from anyone who dares touch our own lifestyle choices.

Our politics and politicians, who want to win, follow.

As an angry-making aside, what is it about Fox News that allows its news commentator Sean Hannity believe that it is ethical to be making calls on behalf of Jim Jordan?

All personal foibles and criminal charges aside, Donald Trump leads the Republican case to become president simply because he wants to tear down anything that contests his view of what Americans want and to erect spiritual, policy, and real walls to protect it. Repeated interviews and focus groups with his followers support this notion, and they see him as the strongest voice for pushing away needed change. His words always are angry.

Age and specific policy issues aside, followers of Joe Biden to continue base their vote on a need to understand that the world is more complex than captured in a slogan and that he is the only one of the competitors to put a future for democracy first. His reactions are based on anger about people he sees sticking their heads in the sand or threatening others.

The obvious answer to the continuing woes involving the House speakership start with getting over personal anger to recognize that it is America’s agenda, not the party’s election hopes that are primary. The job to which these warring Republicans were elected was not to offer daily anger tantrums on the nightly news, but to help govern.

The solutions here have to do with listening and compromise in a split-party government.

Anger Management

We have a plethora of Anger Management classes, institutions, and associations in this country. Almost all of them are aimed at personal anger situations, for which we happen also to have a huge number as reflected in too-high domestic violence, the need for shelters, rising hate crimes, and “lone-wolf” attacks on the street or subway.

We all recognize the issues, and there is widespread support for court intervention and mandated classes for those who find anger just too difficult to keep under control.

We don’t seem to have the same kind of anger management for governments. Over decades now, the United Nations and its emergency Security Council actions have proved toothless and random.

In each country, the answer to societal anger has always been elections at which we seek to throw out one set of bad politicians for the next. But with echoes of the months-long anti-election campaign by supporters of Trump culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capital riot, anger perversely has become ingrained in daily life rather than exorcised along with what gave rise to it.

Even as these issues move through the criminal courts now — we saw two important guilty pleas in the Georgia-based election scheming case over the weekend — each appearance, each step is accompanied by warnings about angry retributive violence for any decisions that do not favor the alleged schemers rather than election protectors.

Our Republican candidates and lawmakers are unwilling to stand against Trump for fear of personal and political anger. What will change this?

In Israel and Gaza, it is anger that prompts bombings and missiles — apparently even 6,000 missiles in two weeks are not enough for either side. For complicated reasons, we finally got one Gaza gate open to allow in 20 inspected trucks with water, food and medicine before the passage was closed again over fear. What will change this?

We cannot ignore, we cannot look away. But we can insist that this is a time for an anger intervention all around.

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