Anger Addiction in the Town Square

   With all the commentary we've heard over the last few days since the shootings in Tucson, I have yet to hear anyone address the fact that a large portion of our populace seems addicted to anger. This is not to deflect blame for the murders.  One man committed them.  But that one man has not been living in a vacuum.  He's been living in the United States of America in its current form.
   As part of the larger picture, we must consdier the talk show and political personalities who play on fear and anger. They are not acting as leaders in any positive sense of the word. They are not even conducting themselves as real grownups. They are playing the role of drug dealer and the principle drug they are dealing is anger.  Yes, anger can be addictive...and when that addiction is widespread, it creates an atmosphere in which violence seems more acceptable, rather than less so, especially to people who have a weak inner core such Jared Loughner.
   In its healthy form, anger is designed to help us protect ourselves.  It is the "fight" end of the fight or flight spectrum.  But in normal social interaction, it's intended to serve us by being used in an appropriately proportional manner.  In other words, if someone mindlessly tosses some litter onto our front yard, it makes sense to channel a dollop of anger into basic assertiveness so we walk out the front door and say, "Excuse me! I'm sure your mind was elsewhere when you dropped that in my yard, but would you please pick it up?" If a child's behavior is disrupting a restaurant, it makes sense for someone, hopefully the owner, to ask the parents to quiet the child down gently or take him outside till he is calmer.  We could come up with a thousand examples like this where anger, channeled appropriately in moderation, helps to keep some reasonable order in our relationships and society.  And we could certainly also come up with examples where a more full-throated response would also make sense--such as if someone tried to invade your home or snatch your kid...or shoot your local member of the House of Representatives.  And, certainly, anger may be an appropriate response to a policy that strikes you as immoral or unethical...but in the political and social spheres, that anger motivates mature people to action, such as the peaceful marches in the 60's for Civil rights and against the war in Viet Nam, or the organizing on the block by block level that takes place during an election cycle.
   But what is going on in our society right now is something quite different and insidious.  That insidiousness is the result of the amplification that results from so many voices shouting so loudly from so many streetcorners of the traditional and electronic media. This is indeed a very different situation from the early days of our republic when news often took weeks to travel and the sources were relatively few.  Today, people are being triggered into anger over and over again because there are dealers willing to give them a fix 24/7  on radio. TV and the Internet. 
    Why are people vulnerable to this blogosblather?  Apparently, they lack the kind of broader emotional and intellectual resources that can help them constructively make a difference in their own lives and the lives of their communities and nation.  Extreme messages strike such people right in the brainstem and limbic system where the primal fight or flight responses are set ever on the alert. 
    Underneath this kind of anger is, in fact, helplessness.  Helplessness is not a common emotion for a mature individual...but for one whose development has been under-nurtured.  Babies wail when their hunger is not addressed in a timely manner because they can't get up and go to the fridge and make themselves a sandwich.  In fact, if their needs go unmet long enough, their wails turn into a kind of full blown rage.  When adults wail and rage, whether on the highway or watching the news at night, they are acting out of some buried, unconscious helplessness, to painful to feel in its pure state.  Rage gives them the illusion of having control, control being the opposite of helplessness.  But it is only an illusion.  They are not in control of the thing that drives them to be in control.  In fact, they experience themselves essentially as victims...and that is what drives them to desperation.  Sadly, during some critical stages of their early development, they have been deprived of the kind of consistent, strong love that they deserved.
     Mature adults living in a civil society are not easily triggered into fear or rage.  They have all kinds of actions available to them to work towards the remedies they envision, as cited above. 
     Unfortunately, those with fewer emotional and behavioral resources at their disposal (this goes to the question of parenting, economic, social and educational inequities in our culture) are more likely to be living in a state of chronic anger, to stand around the water-cooler talking down those with whom they disagree, offering simplistic solutions, going for the easy reaction to the latest public development...and basically taking no constructive action. 
   We are suffering from an overabundance of opinions that are simply the vehicles for our anger...and an insufficiency of reality-based solution thinking. 
   Regularly listening to or watching your "favorite" talk show person or politician or reading your favorite biased paper or magazine tends to keep this anger simmering.  Perpetual anger like this only feeds on itself, reinforcing the neural pathways in our brain like any addiction so that we get stuck in a perpetual "fight or flight" mode.  When our anger fix drops below a certain level, we go after more...more Rush, more Keith, more Glenn, more Randi, more Sarah...
     We should not be the least surprised then, that some individuals will take this over the top and injure or kill someone they see as "a traitor," or "evi" or just "not one of us"...whether they're in a rival gang or a rival political party.
    In therapeutic settings, I have seen people get below rage into the terrible helplessness that drives it...and emerge from such sessions much healthier human beings and much less interested in listening to others pontificate or rag on their favorite frustration. 
   Short of therapy, the simplest thing most of us can do is stop giving our attention, our energy and certainly our money and votes to anyone who is dealing the drugs of anger and fear.  We can check in with ourselves and feel what is moving in us--fear, anger, compassion, curiosity? We can still disagree. We can still call it like we see it.  But democracy, like every great love relationship, is built on compromise, which requires an ability to walk in the shoes of another, to be empathetic to their experience even when we see things differently...and to be committed to finding common ground, knowing that anyone rarely gets everything he or she wants.  Whatever compromise is called for to get to win-win, it is highly preferable to the consequences of win-lose. 
    This is a good time in the history of a nation that regularly places itself in the Judeo-Christian tradition to remember a few sayings from someone we admire who walked the earth more than 2000 years ago.  "Turn the other cheek,"he said.  "He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword," he said.  "Love thine enemies," he said.  "Unless you become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven," he said, enshrining innocence, curiosity and playfulness as some of the highest values.
    We've managed to compromise successfully for most of the last 235 years.  We can find our way back to that spirit, with commitment, humility, a willingness to allow for other points of view, a sense of innocence and lightness of being...and an abiding sense that what is at stake is too big to be subjugated to the will of any one person...or party.