Anger. Real, legitimate, valid anger.
Why are we supposed to reject this emotion as a bad thing?
In response to Richard Cohen, William Rivers Pitt of Truthout.org really gets to the heart of the matter. Why we're mad as hell and why we're not going to take it anymore.
Today he wrote a response to Richard Cohen and it just made me angry. Very, very angry ...
Richard Cohen's ridiculous posture in his
Digital Lynch Mob piece in today's Washington Post (sign up required) is a snapshot of the lazy elite culture running this nation into the ground. It certainly inspired a scathing blog-wide outpouring of
scorn ,
hilarious sarcasm and
outright anger.
But William Rivers Pitt's response today articulated Liberal anger in a way that makes the political so personal and impassioned that it just hurts. And his voice became mine. And as I read I trembled with the coldest of anger as I contemplated the intensity of my own desire for change--a desire that is shared and mutiplied by so many who write and read here.
He writes:
I am, quite often, so angry that my hands shake. Yes, a former high school teacher from New England here, so filled with bile and rage that I sometimes don't recognize my face in the mirror.
His face is mine. It is ours. And if you cannot spy your face in that mirror, then your face remains like that of the vampire's--preying like a parasite on the very lifeblood of what makes our society vigorous and real with every pulse.
But, really, why are we SO angry?:
Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children's future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.
When French Revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, were they supposed to put on a happy face? Did Americans fight the British in 1776 with silly glee? Did protestors in the 60s march against the war because they thought it was a fun carefree way to spend an afternoon?
No.
They were angry. And with damn good reason. Their reasons, their outrage, their insistence on change is ours. Those who mock someone in the midst of their righteous anger shouldn't be surprised one day to wake up with a fist in their face let alone a few hostile emails.
Personally I'd counsel Cohen to take a deep breath and take some advice from Mr. Pitt:
Locate a mirror, Mr. Cohen. Stare deep within it. Know full well that today, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, will recast all your yesterdays as having passed like a comforting dream. Your ability to remain within the safe bubble of the beltway clubhouse, drifting this way and that in some meandering, rudderless fog, has ended. Al Gore invented the internet, or so we are told, and some bright-eyed editor decided to staple your email address to the bottom of your works. Welcome to the age of electronic accountability.
In the meantime it is our responsibility to use our anger. To harness it and channel it for change.
Anger is a gift, after all, one that inspires change. If you don't think we need a change, real change, I can only shake my head.
We need a change. A big, bad change. And I'm angry enough to do something about it.
What did you do with you anger today?