WARS ARE WARS. We prepare ourselves for our wars in the same way that a nation prepares for battle. The nation begins by marinating the minds of the people with a fervor for war. We are shown the injustices and atrocities of the opponent and heated into rage at the enemy’s cruelty. We are deluged with visions of his barbaric acts, and the enemy’s danger to us. We grow to fear the opponent as well as to hate him, and our anger begins to replace our fear. Anger has its function in the human organism. It is an important antidote to fear.
I own a lot of anger. It tags along with me wherever I go, which is not to say that I am an angry person, but that I have a fund of anger that is available to me when I need it. Its source came from a series of experiences along my life’s way, which, although painful, proved to be gifts to me. I wouldn’t be spared my anger. Like steam, it is the stuff that powers the locomotive—it can power me when I call on it. But if anger is not properly contained and released with a certain discipline it can blow things to hell.
I have admonished that we must feel—that without feeling we are the walking dead and as effective as mumbling mannequins. Must we not feel our anger as well? I say yes. But note: The word anger is included in the word danger. Nothing is more dangerous than a lawyer hurling his volley of anger at a jury or a protestor jumping up at a community meeting assaulting the governing council with a barrage of hollering. The danger is not to the recipient of such wrath, but to the angry person himself who will be defeated by his own anger—dismissed as irresponsible, shunned as unreasonable, indeed, as someone to be avoided like the mumps.
Before we can decide what to do with our anger let’s first understand it. What is it? What is its function? Anger arrives on the scene, all red and blistery, and usually in response to hurt. When we are hurt by the words or actions of others we are more likely to be angry than to cry. The insult hurts. We respond in anger. Betrayal brings pain. We reply in anger. When we feel helpless, the pain of it is compensated in anger. Cornered, anger is the natural antidote. Lay a nasty name on me in anger and I immediately attack back in anger with my own insult.
If we understand that anger is most often the product of injury, then don’t we also understand that anger is a secondary emotion—that the hurt, the pain came first, after which anger rushed in to take its place? Indeed, the anger will not diminish until we have relieved ourselves of the hurt. Sometimes this process takes generations. Holy wars never end. The conflict originates in pain—the threat of domination that brought on fear, the killing, the sorrow, the retaliation, and more killing—the circle of pain never ceasing.
If we understand that anger has been seeded by hurt, is it not more useful to deal with the hurt than with the anger? Our hurt is not threatening to the person who hurt us. But our anger is. Anger begets anger. The mirror is always at work. When I am angry at you, you are most likely to return my anger with anger of your own. And the war is on. But if I say to you, “That hurt me,” the response of the other is more likely to be, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, or I wish I hadn’t,” and the war may come to an end. When I am attacked with anger, is it not better to understand that it has come out of the other’s hurt? Instead of responding with my own anger, is it not better to say, “You must be hurt. How did I hurt you?” and the war, again, has a chance to end.
The danger of anger is that it threatens. When I am threatened, the fear of it, the pain, creates my own anger and the war erupts. We have already discovered that to threaten the other is to threaten the self. And as we know, retained, unexpressed anger is a danger to ourselves and to others. If I can quietly, yes, kindly communicate to the other that I am angry and why, the positive product may be peace. If I retain it, the stuff grows like noxious weeds and can take over the landscape. William Blake, the nineteenth-century English poet, wrote:
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
But the nature of the telling is as critical as the telling itself. If I speak of my anger angrily I’ve dug my pit and fallen in it.
Injustice brings on anger. We see it all the time. The child who acts out in school, who attacks his classmates and becomes a disciplinary problem is most often the child who has been mistreated. Nothing more surely instills an unremitting, deadly anger than injustice imposed on the innocent. We see it in the helpless who storm on endlessly and are devoured by their own impotent rage. We see it in the projects, the people striking out with violence. They were born as innocent children. Having committed no crime, they were nevertheless punished with poverty, hatred, filth, and rejection, indeed, with violence—their punishment for the crime of having been born. The fact that 25 percent of all African-American males are in prison or under probation of one kind or another is shameful proof that to punish the innocent funds an enduring anger that is acted out against the system, even against the poor themselves.
When I am asked how I can defend those who have been charged with monstrous crimes I often reply that I seldom see a crime by a single individual that is as evil as the crimes the system imposes year by year on the many. And when the black prisoner from the ghettos is finally released we know the war will still be on, because injustice upon injustice breeds an unrequited anger the product of which is crime. And to the same extent that society stands as a threat to its abandoned members, so too do they stand as a threat to an enlightened society. Such chaos is called a revolution.
We have been taught from the beginning that we must not be angry. “Don’t you dare be angry” is the angry warning that was dumped on us and that we, in turn, unload on our children. From the time of our innocence, our little psyches have been programmed against anger, both ours and theirs. Still, if we withhold our anger and have no healthy way to release it we may become neurotic, suffer a variety of actual physical illnesses, or we may turn our anger inward and become depressed, even suicidal.
Something is lacking in a person who cannot feel anger. Most often it’s that the person does not care. When we are injured or threatened anger comes rushing in to prepare us for the fight, to survive. But it is our anger. It belongs to us in the same way that all our passions belong to us. They are not to be spilled carelessly on the moment’s canvass. Such a painting would be a mess. But the paint of emotion, first recognized and then deftly and honestly applied, can create a masterpiece. The painting requires all shades from black to white and all colors relevant to the presentation. I am not speaking of moderation. I am addressing the skill of applying our emotions faithfully with the grace and skill of a fine painter.
In the courtroom my anger against injustice motivates me to take on the opponent—usually the large corporation or the state that prosecutes a citizen unfairly. I am glad for my anger. But for its energy I might be sitting in a back office of a large law firm drawing deadly boring business contracts or melting into the stacks of books that stare out blankly from their dusty shelves. Still, early in my career my anger defeated me more than once. I have said what we all know—we do not like angry people. But in the same way, we do not trust people who should be angry and who are not. What would we think of a man who watched his wife being physically assaulted and who stood by popping his bubble gum? What would we think of a person who was repeatedly insulted but who did not have the courage to stand up for his rights? Appropriate anger is acceptable to most of us.
In court we confront witnesses who we know are paid, champion liars. I have seen experts take the stand with all of their wrappings of authority, their gold-plated curricula vitae. As if their words descended from heaven, I have watched as they deposit loads of pure excreta on the jurors. It is not that they lie to the jury and thereby earn their monstrous fees for doing so, but that they take advantage of the innocent decision makers who look up to them because these experts have held positions of honor in the scientific world. These are professional witnesses who have learned to look over at the jurors with kind and loving eyes, who can fool even the most discerning for the relatively short time they are on the stand. Even their well-disguised speciousness would be discovered by the jurors if they testified for any extended time—by our truth-seeking psychic tentacles. But for the few hours they occupy the stand they can deceive, and they do.
I see many deserving people deprived of justice because of these well-paid frauds—the horribly crippled children negligently injured in childbirth who can never walk or speak an intelligible word, the woman who will never see again because of an incompetent surgeon asleep at the switch, the hordes of injured who lose their right to justice because insurance companies have embraced these charlatans who, case after case, spread their malignant lies on innocent jurors. Their haughty pretenses and their venomous testimony (which they know is false) always angers me, sometimes to the precipitous edge.
But if we angrily attack these petty prevaricators before their lies have been clearly demonstrated we will lose, because, although we know the truth, the jurors do not. While we are justly angered by the witness’s testimony and see him as a cheat, the jurors see him as a man of enlightened authority, and our attack will appear to be generated by one who has taken a strike in the heart and, without the character to accept it gracefully, releases his anger as does the poor loser.
Until the testimony itself creates anger in the hearts of the listeners, we must redirect the energy of our anger. We do not deny it to ourselves. We feel it. But we rechannel it into a precise, thoughtful, solid cross-examination. Only when the liar is at last exposed is it time for appropriate anger. I say, don’t attack the witness until the jury wants him attacked. Then we had better do our work efficiently and cleanly, and with style.
Aristotle once said, “We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time.” That says it all.
So how do we channel our anger that ought not be dumped whenever we feel it? We are in the moment. We feel it. If we do not feel it we cannot deal with it. I speak to my anger. To myself I may say, “Hello there, anger. I feel you, I respect you, and if you will be patient, I will either let you escape at an appropriate time or I will convert your energy into something useful, perhaps, even something grand. Be patient.” It is a way to become aware of the power of anger, that it’s an emotion to cherish but respect. Without it I would have no moral indignation that urges me to seek justice. My anger tells me I care. It is a weapon in my arsenal, but like any dangerous weapon, one must be aware that one can kill oneself with it.