What Do We Have To Be Mad About?

We were sitting around a table at our monthly book club meeting the other night, when someone in the group started talking about anger.

Everywhere you turn there are hot-headed, obscenity-filled people honking or shouting or elbowing their way through the crowd, their disgust with the human race boiling over menacingly.

I’m not talking about the kind of anger that comes from a tortured life. I’m talking about anger that just doesn’t make sense. Why so many people with hot meals, warm beds and numerous pairs of shoes (none of which have holes in the soles) are so angry at life is beyond me. But they are, and it’s about time the rest of us dealt with it.

For rarely does this anger confine itself to their own sad, disgruntled sphere. It spreads. It infects. Sometimes it explodes. And usually it’s an innocent person getting hurt.

You wonder why it has to be this way. One of the book-club members mentioned a newspaper article she’d read while visiting Seattle, where a homicide had made the front page. But it wasn’t because it was sensational or otherwise unusual as murders go. It won what news people call “good play” for being the city’s first homicide after a 46-day reprieve from such nastiness.

Yes, Seattle, which is more populous than Sacramento by about 35 percent, did not have one murder for 1 months.

Before you call the moving companies for quotes on one-way rates, you should know that Seattle was just as amazed by its streak of tranquility as any other urban center would be. In fact, the no-murder streak left an entire industry confused about what its role should be. Police reporters were bored. The coroner’s office had nothing of great import to do. Homicide detectives changed the batteries in their pagers and worried about what they were missing out there.

But they weren’t missing anything. There was nothing to miss. For whatever reason, no one felt the urge to shoot, stab or strangle another human being for 46 days - or if they did, they somehow refrained.

Our collective acceptance of America as the land of the free, the brave and the worst violence in the industrialized world shows how much we’ve changed.

Several murders occurred in greater Sacramento in the past few weeks, but who among us recalls even one of the victims’ names? The truth is, we’re not aghast at outbursts of violence anymore; in fact, we expect them as symptom of these tenuous times. And still, if we think about the wasted human lives, we shake our heads and wonder why. Why are so many of us walking around feeling so murderously put out?

Ask anyone this question and they will answer you with a story.

The woman who is followed and verbally threatened by a motorist crazy with anger because she pulled out in front of him. He stalks her, rolls down his window and tells her if she ever does that again she’s dead.

A man beats another motorist to a parking spot and ends up hospitalized with a concussion and two broken ribs. “As he hit me, he just kept saying, over and over, ‘Who the (expletive) do you think you are?”’

A woman mistakenly rolls into a crosswalk, inconveniencing a pedestrian. The man is so angry, he kicks in her door. Frightened, the woman pulls out into traffic and is hit.

A motorist tries to get another driver to stop tailgating and ends up getting shot in the head.

Four men argue over a kick-boxing video and one ends up dead.

A restaurant patron, angry about his waiter’s request to extinguish his cigarette, stabs the waiter in the chest.

Then there are the daily displays of anger, the ones we hardly notice anymore. The epithets. The rash of one-finger salutes. Sophomoric namecalling on the Legislature’s floor.

Dr. Robert Emmons, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, believes self-centered attitudes and increased isolation are largely to blame. We expect homes that look like a “House Beautiful” covers. Teenagers demand expensive athletic shoes (never mind the family budget). Students think they deserve A’s because they paid the tuition and showed up in class.

“People have an exaggerated view of what they deserve out of life and when these unrealistic goals aren’t met, they feel frustrated and strike out at others,” Emmons said.

Restoring our sense of connectedness and responsibility to one another would be a good start, he said.

This can be done by feeling grateful for what we have and deciding, as a people, to begin nurturing that feeling of community again. Otherwise, everyone is a stranger and a potential obstacle to our wants and needs. “If change comes, it’s got to happen from the inside out.”

Simplistic? Yes. A starting point? Yes to that, too.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Diana Griego Erwin McClatchy News Service