Picture this. A nice long vacation midway down the Oregon Coast. Rental fee? Owned by family, cost for the use of this beach vacation house is just a few good books to stock up the existing library.
Morning fog. Brilliant sunsets. Ocean’s roar. 180 degrees of uninterrupted sea and sky. An occasional fishing boat, way out. Stars brighter than could be seen around the Puget Sound. No watches. No television. No internet. Outside world forgotten. Peaceful, a veritable slice of heaven.
Re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere, however, was another matter. Somehow, the intense anger of the Earth-bounds had been ever so briefly forgotten. Once back at home and into old routines, it didn’t take long to be reminded yet again that America was indeed an angry place.
Why are we so angry?
The most obvious culprit is the government. It seems all that’s frustrating revolves somehow around the government — like war, recession, unemployment, environment, financial reform, bigotry, health care, taxes and greed.
The majority of us still believe America is going in the wrong direction, even after having changed those in power. What went wrong?
Politics is the common denominator today. It has maneuvered itself into every aspect of American life. From government impotence to corporate greed, from perpetual war to Wall Street gluttony — there’s much cause for concern. Our government has let us down.
Those of my generation, born after WWII as our economy was beginning to prosper, were raised with faith that — as long as we were true hard workers — our government would be there to help with jobs and prosperity. And that this prosperity would, in return, provide the freedom and liberty Americans were hungry for.
Today, some of us — the new poor, the unemployed, the foreclosed parties, the homeless, the disavowed — don’t have to imagine what it’s like when we finally realize that our belief system is flawed. The legacy of our forefathers appears squandered.
Our nation has borrowed heavily and overspent our way into the biggest black hole the world has ever seen.
“The fact is that for a generation we have built our economy on a lie — that we can have a low-wage, high-consumption society and paper over the contradiction with cheap credit funded by our foreign trading partners and financial sector profits made by taking a cut of the flow of cheap credit,” said Ezra Klein the Washington Post.
And so it appears Americans are sending the blame for our economic predicament both inward and outward. Stress, guilt, blame and fear — all creating anger — are byproducts.
Blaming others can be an attempt, “to reverse and deny troubling private feelings of responsibility. Conscious claims of innocence and victimization seek to counteract private feeling of guilt,” says psychologist Michael Bader in an essay last year in Psychology Today.
There’s plenty of understandable anger directed squarely at our government leaders, many of who have, in some eyes, aided and abetted in our economical demise. Why pay Wall Street to be bad? Why apologize to BP for having to pay for some of the cleanup of its spill? Chances are because some politicians have healthy investments in Wall Street and oil.
Anger can be either “directed downward — at ‘welfare cheats,’ women, gays, blacks, and immigrants — or is it aimed up at job exporters and rich tax dodgers? Or out at alien enemies? The answer is likely to depend on the political turn of the screw,” says Arlie Hochschild, sociology professor at University of California Berkeley in an essay in Mother Jones.
Our anger has come blasting out, scattered like buck shot from a shot gun. Perhaps, just perhaps, if we direct our anger using a bit more focus on a specifically deserving target, some specific satisfactory solutions may be found. Step by step. Focused anger has the ability to go much farther than anger out of control.
If we aren’t able to control our anger, I fear it can only keep escalating.
Comments are welcome at marylin.olds@gmail.com.
