Anger & Me

I’m done with it, anger I mean.  It’s a complete turning point in my life.  I’m not talking about my own anger, I’m talking about other people’s anger.  I remember that a couple of decades ago, pop psychology said “Let it all hang out, express yourself, express your anger.”  I think we went to far.  Anger is an infection that can leak into an environment and turn spring air into smog.  Why are people so invested in it?

Anger is not even an original emotion.  It is our thinking response to fear, panic and pain.  Think about it, someone cuts you off in traffic, your very first response is panic or fear, you’re about to get into an accident … will someone get hurt?  And before that millisecond is over, you recover and your judgment takes over.    ‘What’ is wrong with that person, doesn’t he know know how to drive, does he care about anyone else on the road?”  Or “I pay taxes for roads too, you a#$hole!”

Anger is the result of our thoughts about some perceived threat that is facing us.  It is filtered through our belief systems and judgments and is often utilized as a manipulative device – for attention, to get agreement, to defend what we believe is our own.

Here is the thing, it gets into us, it resides in our resentments and in our psyche as a permanent fixture of our anguish.  We want to spit it out onto the world and in most cases with most human beings that is exactly what goes on.  People spit their resentments and emotions onto each other without thought and without care.  They allow their anger to permeate everything in their life.  Sometimes other folks are comfortable in an environment of anger and so they tolerate it, they live with it and they try to appease it.

Well I’m fed up!  I really don’t care if you are angry.  I don’t want that kind of vibration around my being.  I don’t want to feel it, I don’t want to hear it and I am not interested in re-hashing it.  Deal with it.  Give yourself high blood pressure, a heart attack, whatever, but keep it away from me.

I am sick to death of hearing angry stories where the slacker is always the victim of someone, some institution, some situation that has made them bitter about life.  Do you get that YOU are bitter?  Do you get that YOU are now THAT?

Hey, do I sound angry?

Well, in any case.  If you want to talk about what is scaring you, haunting you, hurting you, well okay.  But if all you are going to tell me is your evaluation about the world, forget it, I already have my own evaluation.  And my new world doesn’t tolerate anger, at all.