Expelling, Versus Directing, Our Anger
The greatest challenges humanity faces right now are incredibly complicated. Understanding them requires patience and willingness to become familiar with an array of subjects that don’t make for good sound bytes. Our problems’ root systems sprawl in a thousand directions under the earth, with only a small proportion of them visible without digging. For these reasons, it’s hard to know what to do when we want to make a difference, and one of the most natural responses to frustration is anger.
When our daughter was young, and then not that young, she’d get mad at me whenever she was frustrated about anything. She would lash out at me when the weather didn’t cooperate with her plans, or when she caught a cold. When I would push back, and tell her not to take out her bad mood on me, I could practically see the thoughts churning in her head. She’d try like crazy to figure out what part of her anger could be reasonably construed as my fault. If that hadn’t been so annoying, I would have found it fascinating.
Our daughter put her anger on me because she trusted me. She understood me to be a source of authority from whom many of her resources came. Her mind wanted to believe me to be all-powerful because imagining me able to control everything would mean she was safe. I tried to remember, as she lashed out at me when angry about something that had no specific target, that she was doing so in order to expel anger, and because she thought I could take it.
As she got older, I became less tolerant of her blowing up at me. I felt like I had to, in that I didn’t want her expelling anger on other loved ones later in her life, such as trusted friends or partners. Plus it stinks to be yelled at; my husband and I don’t talk to each other that way, ever, and one of my favorite things about our relationship is that I never feel like a victim of his ups and downs. If someone’s angry at me, I want to do something about it. If I can’t, it’s not a receiving end on which I want to live.
Being angry requires a lot of energy, and staying angry is a chronic drain. Therefore, it’s important for those who are trying to get something done to pause from time to time and ask if they are carrying any anger has some potential resolution. They could be using that energy for something else, after all. Anger’s an important emotion but not one to which we want to become so accustomed that it drains our accounts without our noticing.
I believe that college students who are protesting the war on Gaza are doing the right thing by drawing attention to America’s complicity in ongoing violence against vulnerable civilians with nowhere to run. Their demands upon their institutions, however, sometimes ring of activists who don’t know where to direct their anger. They’re expelling anger, not pointing it in a strategic direction. Divestiture from unjust economic interests is a worthy thing to do, but it’s so abstract. By designing protests that hinge on an us-versus-them formulation of demands, opportunities to work together in awareness-raising get lost.
When students construe their universities’ administrations as the enemy, they set up a dynamic. Sometimes students are exactly right in their assignments of the “enemy” role: the administration isn’t listening to them nor representing their interests faithfully. Sometimes, students feel generally angry and look to who’s powerful and close-by. Grass-roots organizers need to think smarter than that to get results, not painting those in authority with one brush. They need to look closer and identify potential allies. And that means knowing, and articulating, what they want.
The complexity of the world’s biggest problems makes it hard for all of us to figure out what we want to see happen. The war in Israel and Palestine has historic roots going back thousands of years and involves nations, economies, and religions. I look at images of rubble — so much rubble — and want it all to stop. That requires me to pause before pointing, and to ask what I can do before directing my anger at the institutions that scaffold my life.
Here’s what I can do: pay attention, and encourage others to do the same. And keep talking. So many university administrators are staying silent because anything they say can and will be used against them on such a delicate topic as war in the Middle East. In this way, student protests are backfiring, as they’re preventing their institutions from saying what needs to be said. I’m not saying that the silence is the students’ fault. I’m saying the us-versus-them dynamic is playing into the hands of the invisible empire that is capitalistic power and greed, which flourishes in silence.
One of my best friends is from Sudan. She came to the US as an asylee, and this time last summer, she was crying every day from the minute she woke up. The world learned of the war that broke out there, was extremely concerned, but then got overwhelmed with other worries. I’ve asked my friend to explain the war’s cause and status several times, and honestly, it’s hard for me to keep track of it. I didn’t know much about it before, and now my connection to it is that I care about my friend.
Therefore, I have some sense of how possible, and how dangerous, it would be for the world to lose track of Gaza, where international support — or lack of it — will be a deciding factor in Palestine’s eventual fate. I also have compassion for students and other activists who lash out at their leaders without a clear agenda for what’s to be done.
We all turn to, or turn on, those in-charge because they have power. It takes thoughtful attention to take stock of the power we have, too, and see where common ground might lie before lashing out or tearing down.
