Government, The U.N., The Poor? Be Real
Perhaps what we need around here are lessons in how to get angry.
I grant you, the appeal of this notion is not immediately apparent. It would seem to the superficial observer that there is already a sufficiency of anger floating about in our great nation. Certainly, the number of people who cannot talk about politics or the media or Wall Street, or almost anything else without getting all red in the face, is practically infinite. A more select group - the anger-gifted - turn purple; the tendons start to stand out in their necks, and their wattles commence to shake like a turkey gobbler’s. Good grief.
It’s not the quantity of anger in America that concerns me, or even the quality, but the sheer waste of anger.
The first problem is wasting anger on things that (a) don’t exist at all or (b) matter so little that they might as well not exist. The United Nations plot to take over the world. Black helicopters. The international biosphere. The liberal media. (How long have those folks been out of the loop?) The Bilderbergers. The secular humanists. The cover-up of what happened to Flight 800. Al Gore’s Red connections. (Got that from a recent edition of The New American, a veritable fountain of paranoia.) The plot to make America into a police state. And so forth.
Imagine wasting all that perfectly good anger on paranoid fantasies. Behind them all is a touching faith that someone, somewhere is actually in charge of what’s happening - a proposition I beg leave to doubt.
In addition to the invented target for anger, we suffer from the classic misdirection of anger. Misdirected anger, the shrinks tell us, is as common as dirt. A big kid hits a little kid; the little kid can’t hit the big kid back, so he goes and whacks a littler kid instead. You see it all the time. Guy is mad at his boss and can’t do anything about it, so he comes home and yells at his wife and kids instead. And so on down the food chain.
Most of the racism you see is misdirected anger, from your basic Ku Klux Kluckers (who think black folks are somehow responsible for the way the world is run) to the folks who’ve decided illegal immigrants are responsible for the decline of civilization (not to mention the American economy) to those Einsteins who have analyzed our problems and determined that teenage welfare mothers are behind the collapse of “values.”
The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it’s not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point.
Poor people were not in charge of the S&Ls. Poor people do not shut down factories. Poor people are not in charge of those mergers and acquisitions in which tens of thousands of people lose their jobs so a few people in top positions can make a killing in the stock market. Poor people did not decide to keep wages either steady or falling for the last 20 years. Poor people didn’t decide to use less costly “contract employees.”
You notice that the common corollary to blaming poor people for the country’s problems is to blame poor people for their own problems. That’s a particularly satisfying exercise because if we can make ourselves believe poor folks are responsible for their own problems, the rest of us are absolved of any responsibility for them. Homeless people, people on welfare - hey, we know how to fix that: Those folks should just get jobs, right? As though most people in poverty don’t already have jobs.
We like to blame the victim because, if it’s not the victim’s fault, it could happen to anybody. It could even happen to you. And that is scary. That’s why we used to claim women got raped because they were in the wrong part of town or were wearing short skirts, or … until women finally got fed up and said, “Forget that - let’s blame the rapists instead.”
People who blame the government for everything are at least closer to the mark. But the sense of constriction for which so many of us blame government - cutting the speed limit, making bikers wear helmets, telling us we can’t put up a big sign on a building, can’t add a garage without a permit, can’t build a factory in a suburb, can’t do this, can’t do that - is not so much a reflection of a power-crazed government as it is of a crowded and complex society.
True, none of us is as free as we would have been had we lived on the frontier 100 years ago. But this ain’t a frontier and this ain’t 100 years ago. The more crowded and complex society becomes, the more each of your actions is apt to impinge on someone around you. As Woodrow Call complained in “Lonesome Dove,” it’s gotten so you can’t even pee off your back porch anymore without upsetting the neighbors.
The amazing thing about what happens when you hold people with real power in this society responsible for the way it’s run is that they - each and every one - will then begin to explain to you how powerless they are. My favorite example is “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap, the CEO who gets hired to fire people. Dunlap claims that he has no choice - he has to answer to those stockholders.
But I would suggest that you hold your fire, and your anger, for those who have power. Wasting it on imaginary threats or powerless people is wasting a valuable national resource.
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