The Politics of Anger

On the day following “No Kings Day,” I’m feeling uncommonly good. I was a part of one of four gatherings in the Coachella Valley of California that together counted about 8.5 thousand participants. At long last, it appears that an increasing number of Americans are waking up and standing united in determination not to surrender democracy to those who are working to replace it with authoritarianism.

There was a lightheartedness in Palm Springs, some folks wearing mock-king outfits, carrying clever signs, taking photos and pictures. Underneath all that was an unmistakable seriousness. I chatted with several strangers near the three of us who had come together. Those conversations weren’t about fun and games. Folks were serious. Some expressed exasperation, fatigue, disbelief. I doubt that I’m the only one who both enjoyed being among people who shared a common cause and also knew that this coming week we’d be back in the land where vitriol would pour out on social media, more outrages would goad the populace into reactivity, more squabbling in Congress would perhaps end In curtailing rights, funding, or apply the brakes on an out-of-control Administration.

That is the world we are living in: a nation ripped asunder by enmity, distrust, disrespect, and a disturbing rise in political violence. We swim in floods of fear, terror, and above all, anger.

Anger comes in many shades of red, or whatever color you imagine anger to “feel” like. Anger ranges from irritation all the way to uncontrolled rage. It splits families, tests friendships, starts fights, sparks armed conflicts, erupts in war, spurs immorality, disdains reason, cheapens decency, and strews the world with corpses. Little wonder that so many of us are anger-averse.

Often the religious role vis-à-vis anger oscillates from provoking anger to denying it. Neither is healthy or helpful. In the present climate, we urgently need not only effective anger management, but understanding how to utilize anger.

Have you ever thought about the role of anger as a change agent? Look no further back into history than No Kings Day which as I write is less than 30 hours ago. What got millions of people into the streets of cities, small towns, red States and blue States, worked up enough to march, chant, or otherwise demand change? Anger. What impels people to go to bat on behalf of folks they don’t even know when those folks’ rights are being violated? Anger. What produces regime change in totalitarian societies? Anger. Not satisfaction, not placidity. Anger.

But simply getting angry doesn’t do anything except raise the blood pressure of those who get angry. Anger without direction, unmoored from purpose, is dangerous and quite possibly lethal. Even with purpose it can be deadly—as probably accounts for the two assassination attempts—one tragically successful—in Minnesota at the beginning of No Kings Day.

Just as the range of anger intensity is wide, so is the complexity of dealing with anger daunting. How might we reframe and redirect anger and turn it into something besides frightening?

First, there’s an urgent need for widespread, deliberate recognition that anger is, like sadness, gladness, and fear, an emotion that humans all have but appropriate differently. Anger is part of us, and like every other part of us, deserves to be owned. Anger does not have to escalate into violence and hatred. Nor must it degenerate into self-recrimination, shame, or depression, any of which can result from anger turned inward. Some of this work has been going on for years. We need more.

No self-help group, therapy, recovery program, or life coaching can get very far without addressing the issue of how individuals deal with anger. At the same time, thousands upon thousands of people lead lives far, far away from any context in which they could even be encouraged to address anger, or for that matter, any other difficult feelings such as sadness, despair, or fear. Faith communities need to be offering opportunities for people to claim their anger, addressing what they can do with and about it. Right now, we have an epidemic of anger and it is hardening hearts and minds. Putting on a happy face may supply a brief break, but its effects are short-lived. Schools that have now become Ground Zero for anger erupting into gun violence need to expand ways of working with families, not just in the wake of tragic shootings and other catastrophes, but continually. Workplaces, too, are places where people can be incentivized to grow in knowing how to identify and manage anger and other troubling feelings. In short, wherever people are, are the places we need to be identifying as sites to reach and help them.

Anger doesn’t “trickle down” or spread quietly. Neither do ways of managing anger. Not when anger is serious, deep, and widespread, such as is the anger we’re dealing now. It’s not just with ordinary levels of anger—which can be daunting enough—but with anger that is like summer wildfires in dry forests. Am I exaggerating? I don’t mean to be. There are encouraging signs, not least is that 4 or 5 million people showed up on June 14 to protest in cities, towns, rural areas across the nation and US territories, and those protests were peaceful. Unfortunately, we now have a government that is actively and unabashedly provoking clashes which, when they take place and get out of hand, provide a pretext for suppressing dissent and further snatching away constitutional rights. The playbook being followed is clear: provoke clashes with authorities, claim that things are way out of hand, and move towards establishing a police state and then completely controlling all the levers of power—judicial, military, media, legislature—through martial law.

How do we utilize anger? That is quite different from anger management but certainly not oppositional to it.

When I arrived in 2004 in Washington, DC, within my first couple of weeks as Senior Priest at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church I had lunch with The Rev. Rob Hardies, the Senior Pastor of All Souls Church Unitarian. Rob was heavily involved in Washington Interfaith Network and was eager to tell me about the organization. WIN was a network of congregations of all brands and sizes who had come together to fight for social justice, led by community organizers trained in the Saul Alinsky tradition. Alinsky was a political theorist and activist who worked through the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago to organize poor and marginalized people to press demands on employers, landlords, bankers, politicians, and business leaders. [Read more about him in Wikipedia.] Before our lunch was over, Rob had convinced me to take the training offered by a cadre of WIN leaders and others.

I spent a couple of days learning the basics of community organizing. My second biggest take-away from that experience was how community organizing was a form of what I’d known for years as “pastoral care and counseling.” That is, community organizing entails listening to people: hearing their stories, encouraging them to express what’s on their minds, what their needs and hopes and frustrations are. My biggest takeaway from the training was to look for what people were angry about. That was a major departure from “anger management.” The insight of Alinksy was that anger was the fuel for change. When people get worked up because of first bad, then rugged, and finally intolerable conditions, they want relief. They’ll organize with each other to fight for the changes they need.

That, I think, addresses precisely where we are today. There’s much work to be done to claim and manage our anger, lest it explode in destruction and tragedy. But we can’t stop there. We also need to become far more skilled in utilizing anger to effect change.

Interestingly, both the Left and the Right have at times modeled their approaches on some of Alinksy’s insights. While it is true that he articulated many of the ideals of the political Left, community organizing is by no means owned by progressives. You can readily understand how tapping into people’s anger is exactly what will make change possible. The question always up for grabs is whether that change is desirable, and whom will it benefit.

It’s obvious that an enormous swath of people in this country is angry and has been angry for a long time. Not all of them have been angry over the same things for the same reasons. In my opinion, there’s a lot of qualitative difference between the anger of the rich and well fed and that of the poor and malnourished. Although Abraham Maslow’s famous pyramid illustrating a hierarchy of human needs has been rightly criticized on various grounds including lack of empirical supporting evidence and cultural bias, I think a kernel of truth lies in his basic notion that the primary needs of human beings are physical: food, shelter, protection from the elements, bodily health, freedom from pain, etc. It’s hard to argue that basic personal freedom (as opposed to enslavement) isn’t just as important or more important than anything on that short list. For long periods in American history, huge numbers of people lack one or more of those things. That was true in much of the world for ages and still is true for millions of people.

On top of all that, the narrative that Americans have been weaving for ourselves for the better part of three centuries is that this is the land of opportunity. We have collectively promulgated the idea and held out the promise that with hard work anyone can have whatever they desire. No one who has an ounce of observation powers could possibly believe that, but it is recited again and again as if it were a creedal statement (because it is). It takes more than “hard work.” No amount of hard work will offset the lack of basic health, decent food and air, clean water, intelligence, and lots of “luck” in the form of things that no one can control but which fall into the laps of those who are at the right place at the right time.

There are rewards to be had for many things, most of which we had nothing to do with inventing, bestowing, achieving, or deserving. What but anger could result from increasing diminishment of opportunity for growing numbers of people who are left out of the game? The rich literally get richer, the poor poorer. This has been, with few exceptions, the trajectory of our society since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. When governments, i.e., non-profit means, cease to supply what they can of those physical needs like basic health care and a clean and safe environment, or when getting those basic needs is contingent on what people cannot produce (like money and time), is it any wonder that those deprived of the very things required to “achieve the American dream” would be somewhere between angry and thoroughly outraged? Have we never seen or read Les Miserables? Do we know nothing about revolutions that begin with the powerless, many of which fail precisely because the powerless are up against power?

If you know much about anger, you know that it doesn’t serve Reason very well, nor does it take its cues from the rational. Instead, what angry people tend to do is choose some external cause, person, movement or group (usually vulnerable), to blame for their plight. Sometimes it’s the rich. Sometimes it’s the poor. Sometimes it’s political opponents. Sometimes its Jews or Muslims, or people of color or sexual minorities. The Left blames the right for wrecking democracy. The Right blames the Left for being “elitist” or radical. It seems to me that there are very few avenues out of this angry mess, except what I’ve suggested above. I’m not unmindful of how exceedingly difficult it is to reform a whole society, especially one that is as diverse and splintered as ours is.

But hard tasks have been done before. Denazification took place in Germany after the Axis defeat in World War II. It didn’t work perfectly and, like all massive endeavors, had its share of flaws. But the overall result was positive, judged by the democratic society that Germany became, especially after reunification in 1990. A very different kind of project but similar in its national scope was the process of Truth and Reconciliation after the collapse of the apartheid government in South Africa. That, too, was less than totally successful. But both of these very different processes with different origins, motivations, and goals do give some hope that major national reforms can take place.

We aren’t constrained by models in Europe and Africa. We can undertake reforms based on our own history, learning from successes and from failures. I personally believe that we would be very unwise to try to start all over with a new Constitution, although the number of States required to agree to a constitutional convention (as provided by the Constitution itself) has come perilously close to meeting the requirement. We won’t get very far until we have a far better educated populace that understands some realities about American history than is now the case. Heather Cox Richardson made the statement as No Kings Day unfolded that Americans were learning on the fly what American democracy includes, demands, entails.

One of the things we need to do, in my opinion, is come clean about the deep racism that is embedded in our history, our culture, our society. The good news is that we are not starting from scratch. Much good work has been done in the last several decades, and much of it is spread around the country in the form of educational institutions like museums and libraries. These are the kinds of things that can get at some of the root causes of massive anger and help to create fresh narratives. I’ve included a list of some such places below.

It's daunting. And it’s even more challenging because we are now facing down a government that is undercutting the very things that could serve as means of healing. All the more reason why we might seriously consider taking strong stands beginning in our own circles—neighbors, families, friends, associates—not to debate them, but to invite them to unpack their own anger. As one who has strong feeling and very decided opinions about lots of things, I can say that the work is hard. And I’m far from sure that hard work is all that’s required to get us into the land of the American dream of a less hostile society.

I keep coming back to the basic questions I keep asking myself: if I don’t do it, who will? If you don’t do it, whom will I have to support and be supported by?

Native American History

• National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) - Washington, D.C. & New York City: Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the NMAI is a premier museum dedicated to the life, languages, literature, history, and arts of Native Americans of the Western Hemisphere. They have two main locations.

• First Americans Museum - Oklahoma City, OK: A state-of-the-art museum dedicated to the collective histories of Oklahoma's 39 tribal nations, many of whom were forcibly removed to the state.

• Heard Museum - Phoenix, AZ: Celebrates the beauty and history of Indigenous American art, with a focus on Native peoples of the Southwest.

• Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center - Mashantucket, CT: Explores the history and culture of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe and other Native American tribes in the Northeast, from the Ice Age to the present.

• Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art - Indianapolis, IN: Features extensive collections of Native American and Western art and cultural objects.

African American History

• National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) - Washington, D.C.: The newest Smithsonian museum, offering a comprehensive look at African American history and culture from slavery to the present day. It's a must-visit.

• National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel - Memphis, TN: Located at the assassination site of Martin Luther King Jr., this museum chronicles the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

• National Underground Railroad Freedom Center - Cincinnati, OH: Explores the history of the Underground Railroad and the ongoing struggle for freedom.

• The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration & The National Memorial for Peace and Justice - Montgomery, AL: These two powerful sites, created by the Equal Justice Initiative, confront the history of racial terror and its legacies.

• Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History - Detroit, MI: One of the world's largest museums dedicated to the African American experience.

• DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center - Chicago, IL: The first independent museum of Black history in the United States.

• African American Museum in Philadelphia - Philadelphia, PA: The first institution built and funded by a major municipality to preserve, interpret, and exhibit the heritage of African Americans.

• International African American Museum - Charleston, SC: Located on the site where many enslaved Africans first arrived in North America, this new museum focuses on the diverse journeys and achievements of African Americans.

State and Local Museums (Examples - many more exist!)

Many states have dedicated museums or significant exhibits within their general history museums. Local historical societies and cultural centers also play a crucial role.

Native American History (State/Local Examples)

• California State Indian Museum - Sacramento, CA: Focuses on the history, culture, and traditions of California's diverse Native American tribes.

• Museum of the Cherokee People - Cherokee, NC: Dedicated to the history and culture of the Cherokee people.

• Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum - Clewiston, FL (Seminole Tribe): Located on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation, it tells the story of the Seminole people.

• Museum of Native American History - Bentonville, AR: Features artifacts spanning 24,000 years of Native American history.

• The Iroquois Indian Museum - Howes Cave, NY: Dedicated to contemporary Iroquois art and traditional culture.

• Indian Mound and Museum / Moundville Archaeological Park - Alabama: Sites that preserve and interpret the history of the Mississippian culture.

• Chumash Indian Museum - Thousand Oaks, CA: Focuses on the Chumash people of California.

• Ya'i Heki' Regional Indian Museum - Lake Perris State Recreation Area, CA: Showcases the history and culture of Native American tribes in the Inland Empire region.

African American History (State/Local Examples)

• California African American Museum (CAAM) - Los Angeles, CA: Explores the art, history, and culture of African Americans, with a focus on California and the Western United States.

• Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture - Baltimore, MD: The state of Maryland's official museum of African American history and culture.

• Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia - Richmond, VA: Collects, preserves, and interprets the history and culture of African Americans in Virginia.

• African American Museum of Iowa - Cedar Rapids, IA: Dedicated to preserving Iowa's African American heritage.

• Birmingham Civil Rights Institute - Birmingham, AL: Located in a pivotal city for the Civil Rights Movement, it chronicles the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

• Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture - Charlotte, NC: Showcases the contributions of Africans and African Americans to American culture.

• Alexandria Black History Museum - Alexandria, VA: Focuses on the history of African Americans in Alexandria.

• Backstreet Cultural Museum - New Orleans, LA: Celebrates the unique African American cultural traditions of New Orleans, particularly "social aid and pleasure clubs" and Mardi Gras Indians.