Anger Management

I was drawn to her immediately. Her presence loving and her story real. You could just feel it. No surprise then when she told me she was from Detroit. It doesn’t get more real than that. Detroit, Michigan once the darling of America’s industrial excellence, featuring the Big 3 automakers that were among the highest valued companies in the world, went through a huge recession and had horrendous crime around the time she and I were growing up, a byproduct of white flight, racist policies, and crack cocaine.

I grew up not far from there and a world apart. Not far as I lived outside of Flint, which was like a small Detroit, up until the 8th grade and later in a quaint village near 13-mile, just 5-miles from the infamous “8-mile” movie starring Eminem. Worlds apart as we lived in the suburbs with single-family homes with big fenced yards and for the better part of my adult life now, I’ve lived in Marin County, one of the wealthiest counties in America. I’m surrounded by almost entirely white neighbors where often the only people of color are those that work here primarily as cooks, construction workers, landscapers, and cleaners. There are people of color that own businesses and live here too, although limited and mostly separate. Nobody I know is racist, but to some it may look and feel that way.

I would learn that she, an African-American, grew up surrounded by people of her own kind. Black families, black students, and even a black dentist she jokes. She has lived the better part of her adult life in Oakland. It’s like the Detroit of the Bay Area with an incredibly rich culture and an incredibly poor population.

Not far and worlds apart.

She was drawn to me as well, but not from my loving presence I’m afraid. I had made a remark that emotionally impacted her as I would soon learn it appeared insensitive to the truth that people of color are facing. I had to admit to my limited perspective due in part to a “privileged” life. I place the word privileged in quotes to emphasize it and not diminish its influence. I am incredibly privileged to not have experienced abuse, crime, discrimination, police brutality, mass incarceration, boarded up homes, or crack cocaine. As a Jew, I do share some history of oppression, hate and violence, but here in America, at least for now, I am considered White.

It’s easy to be insensitive if you are ignorant. It’s harder to fathom when you should know better. I would say I am somewhere between these two ends, ignorant and should know better, thus this distinction is where I want to dive into the theme of the article, which I titled “Anger Management” although this will not be a deep study on how to manage your anger…

Our conversation continued throughout the night and our bond felt really strong when we said goodbye, at least it did to me! Earlier we had a funny/odd moment when I shared that I was “ready” to give up my Anger toward certain people and behaviors I referred to as “stupid human tricks”, but not my Judgment that such behavior is indeed “mindless” and deserving of such condemnation. The funny thing was she confessed to the opposite, the desire to give up Judgment and not Anger.

Maybe this is where we are at right now in America and the world, not far and worlds apart.

Let me explain my readiness… I do not want to suppress nor channel my anger in a ‘healthier’ way. I want it to go away. You see, in most every instance my anger has hurt me and others. Fortunately not too bad and as I’ve matured I’ve been privileged to know and practice ways of dealing with anger so it does not escalate to violence nor smolder into hate. My anger is mostly my problem at this stage and I’d like to be done with it. My hope is that by announcing my readiness for change, I will step into a new story and way of being free of feeling anger at the driver speeding down our residential street, the smoker flicking his butts, the meat eaters, the disingenuous, the unconscious, and of course, the haters. My anger is lost on them, used against me, and may otherwise inflame and ignite theirs.

Hearing this opposing perspective has helped me understand mine. Now please recognize that she didn’t say this and may very well argue against it, but the truth is I have no right to my anger. It’s like I’ve been wronged and am suffering at another’s cruelty. Only problem is that I haven’t truly been wronged, at least not to the level that I think should trigger such feelings of anger. If that’s true, then why do I react in this way?

Anger is most often associated with pain, loss and conflict that one perceives themselves or someone/thing they care about to be the victim and to which there is someone/thing to blame. Anger is appears lies in perception. We are typically not angry at the hurricane when it destroys our home, but we may be angry at the failures of the hurricane warning system or perhaps the weather forecasters should the hurricane not even make landfall. Anger arises from our perception, much like all the emotions, regardless of whether we are right or wrong.

Anger is not inherently bad. Like all emotions it serves to activate a conscious thought and resulting action. Anger strongly activates the Sympathetic Nervous System and my tendency is to fight, whereas others flight, and more still just freeze. None of those are particularly effective for dealing with anything other than a sabertooth tiger. If you’ve experienced pain and trauma, anger is a reminder to be vigilant and can give you improbable power to end the abuse, fight off a modern day sabertooth tiger. Like all things, it has two sides and anger can very quickly turn ‘us into them’. That which we hate will hate us back. Violence begets violence. Eye for an eye.

Of course I have a right to be angry if something is truly worthy of that anger. I was angry at my dad for being so rational, my mom for being so irrational, one brother for being mean, and the other arrogant. They may have been all those things, but they were always there for me and I had a blessed childhood. Maturing I’ve come to learn that I was all those things to them too. I was too arrogant for my father’s liking, too mean for my younger brother, too rational for my mother, and too irrational for my older brother. We exist in relationship and what I am to others is part of what I am — ignorance, false-projection, or not.

So when I look at my anger now I can see how unfair it is and how much may indeed be my own projections onto others. While at times my anger may be righteous and even useful, I need to clarify this distinction in my body and mind.

Here’s how I see it… Anger feels like the body part of the equation, whereas Judgment the mind. Judgment to me is the power of discernment of whether someone or something is mindful vs. mindless, helpful vs. hurtful, or trustworthy vs. suspect. I have a value system and I’d like to keep it. I just don’t want to be angry at people when they don’t live up to my value system. Who says mine is best? What am I under, over, or not valuing at all? So that my Judgment may be a “wise discernment” and not “foolish condemnation”, I feel I need to let go of the Anger.

My friend may have more of a right to Anger. I believe she has witnessed and experienced so much more pain and suffering and, while our shared ancestral traumas bring us closer, the lives we’ve lived seem a world apart. It’s almost cliche at this point to discuss our different relationships with the police, for example, and if I’m not willing to listen, it’s hard for me to believe. I remember being escorted home by the police after getting caught drinking with friends in a parking lot. They just wanted to make sure we were safe, you know, protect and serve.

When White people confront the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s instinctual to say “all lives matter” which is totally insensitive to the fact that this movement is about Black lives not mattering in American society. Statistics alone do not tell the story of how systemic and outright racial policies and peoples have led to the continued oppression of blacks all across America. People who are quick to divert into things like “what about black on black violence?” or deflect into distortions that “this is a free society and we all make our own bed” are not seeing the formulations and fallacies of such arguments. To say they are insensitive is insensitive to the willful blindness and deep rooted racism that is America. Anger it would seem to me is an appropriate feeling.

Anger when poorly expressed is destructive versus constructive. Some will argue that destroying property and escalating intensity or even violence are necessary forces of change (ie. “constructive”) and I wouldn’t disagree that when the forces preventing change do so forcefully themselves and/or the blindness so deep that nobody’s seeing what’s going on, it may indeed require civil unrest. When people feel more despair than hope, anger and even violence are logical, if not deeply troubling, outcomes.

Still though nobody wants anger and violence. Not the oppressor or the oppressed as Pancho Ramos, a non-violent activist proclaims, “there are victims on both sides of the gun”.

It’s not that “they” want to take away your rights so they can now be the oppressors. More likely, they want me to use my privilege to help make a better world. The oppressed need allies, while the oppressors need enemies. We in privileged places need to be wary of our hoarding and fear mongering lest we be the racist oppressors we feel accused.

It’s true that I had nothing to do with slavery or racism and it’s true that I’ve benefiting from their economic and social effects. While I haven’t exactly chosen the path of success my father and grandfather, our country’s forefathers, and my people laid out for me, it has chosen me. Being chosen in this way is a privilege and comes at a cost. The price for privilege often paid in a community void of community, families not knowing unconditional love, and an isolation that comes from being entirely self-relient. Worse yet is the “keeping up with the Joneses” that keeps each against all in a mindless race to the top of a heap of junk.

I don’t really wish such privilege upon anyone. Out of poverty and free to choose, yes, but in the end I recognize despite having so much, I’m no better off. What I’m really angry about is that my gifts were not seen nor cultivated and not received by a society fixated on money and status. My core wound is not being seen, especially by my family and friends, due to a larger cultural narrative that Charles Eisenstein refers to as “The Story of Separation”. In this story we are obligated to “make a living” and, if we are lucky we might even “make a name” for ourselves. It’s as if we are cast out and the only way to gain entry is to excel at what society wants.

There are so many local and regional societal norms, however the United States of America is built on Capitalism. Capitalism sees the good in profit, productivity, and growth. This limited focus allowed for slavery, violent suppession, profitering, international explotation, war and environmental destruction. All of these things at a significantly greater expense to people of color.

I have a hard time seeing the good in our world destroying machine. I can only imagine how hard it must be sometimes to see the good from a person of color’s perspective. Just as you would have it, my new friend revealed to me that her gift is seeing the good in others!

Here I’m projecting out of curiousity, but perhaps she wishes to keep the Anger because it is righteous and necessary? Anger can be a powerful ally if clearly identified and I suspect using her gift of seeing the good is a powerful tool for helping to release Judgment without discarding the Anger still present, nor negligent of the work to be done.

Anger is scary. It can certainly fuel hatred and violence, yet also be a force of positive reckoning. Anger can be like a performance, a ceremony of sorts that must be witnessed. Anger needs to be seen for without being seen I’m afraid it will fester and eventually explode.

Perhaps then, stick with me here, being seen is the antidote to Anger. It can take practice seeing the good in others and may not come naturally for us humans. We do naturally have more empathy (understanding) of those we share common history. People of the same religion, ethnicity, socio-economic status, or political ideology are easy to identify with as our lives are comparable and beliefs supportive. Empathy it seems is less accessible when we don’t already understand through commonalities. So it takes practice to cultivate a curious mind that sees other as more similar than different.

When we see the other, not as other, we are offering a gift. It’s like a prayer. A sacred offering that, if anyone is watching, shows that we still believe in the goodness of humanity and, while that core goodness will have outliers and spaces in between, seeing the good works on an energetic level to help lift others up in unseen magical ways. I know because being seen has done that for me.

May we all be seen for our good and see others the same.

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