#RevThread # 160(b)
Stewarding Righteous Anger
1/Both "Hamlet" and its comic counterpart, "Measure for Measure" deal with the management of emotions that are outraged by injustice...
Stewarding Righteous Anger
1/Both "Hamlet" and its comic counterpart, "Measure for Measure" deal with the management of emotions that are outraged by injustice...
2/... I say that just to show that this is a big issue. Handling it badly can lead to many deaths; handling it wisely can lead to social renewal.
3/ Here’s what comes to me: Righteous anger needs to be Sustained, it needs to be Confined, and it needs to Counterbalanced.
4/ Sustained: It’s no good getting mad for a while and then just deciding to resign myself to the ruin of our land. This is a serious moment demanding a serious response. We can watch the news and follow folks on Twitter or Facebook or other SM platforms.
5/ Trumplandia is a place of a thousand shocking events glossed over in a day or two and then dropped. The blur is by design. Who can help us keep seeing the big picture?
6/ Besides many reporters and commentators, I need more sustained and more widely scoped sources. I commend books. Three good authors to start with are Craig Unger (House of Trump, House of Putin), Madeline Albright (Fascism: a Warning),
7/ and Michael Lewis (The Fifth Risk). They will lead you to other, more recently developed sources. The more you can ground your anger in well-researched data, the more confidence you will have in sustaining your opposition to Trumplandia.
8/ Confining: Righteous anger means not letting the anger we rightly feel at this treasonous crappola stoke us into hostility against the world at large.
9/ Hostility has to be consciously confined or we become unjust, especially to those who are close to us, as our hostility can leak out on them. Controlled burns are way more helpful than wildfires.
10/ How do I confine hostility? Imperfectly. But I get better with practice. I read stuff that doesn’t deal with Trumplandia. My wife and I refuse to talking about it over dinner.
11/ I have found the concept of a “box on a shelf” to be helpful. I just decide to put Trumplandia into its box and stick it up on the shelf. I picture that shelf in the back of my brain, and put all things political on it before going to bed.
12/ I don’t ever let Trump’s voice come into our home because his bilge can get me upset for hours.
13/ I do my best to hate the sin and not the sinner, but if God grades me on how I’m doing with the Donald, I’ll get an ‘F’. I work at deciding to retain compassion for the folks who are all in with Trump. Maybe I get a ‘D’ on that; it’s the best I can do for them.
14/Just knowing that it is my duty to confine my hostility is the most helpful thing. And when I discover that it’s leaked into other areas, I pray for help and apologize.
15/ I use the righteous anger, which is pretty intense, to stay involved -- I attend to the news carefully, I belong to a local progressive political group, so I do protests, write opinion pieces for our local newspaper, do phone calls for our local candidate for Congress....
16/ Counterbalance: To counterbalance Trumplandia, I do unrelated, positive things. My wife and I are about to celebrate our 53rd wedding anniversary. I plant and tend flowers and vegetables...
17/ I play the piano. I walk my wonderful dog. I read poems. We enjoy two book clubs that meet weekly. We go to church on Zoom. I marvel at my 20 year-old cat. I talk with my kids and grandkids.
18/ I choose to remember that beauty and love surround me, and it’s all gift.
19/ Back to Job. God, when speaking from the whirlwind, asks Job if Job can say to the proud waves, “Thus far may you come and no further.”
20/ Although I can’t get the ocean to obey me, I can tell this mafia money-laundering punk and his crowd of foolish supporters, “thus far may you come and no further.”
Hope this helps.
Hope this helps.
