Last week my dear readers were kind enough to put up with the blast of grievance and outrage coming from my writing room here in the Bay Area.
I couldn’t help myself. I was annoyed. Angry. Insulted. I felt dismissed by the conversation I’d had with a technical support person. When I told her I was having trouble with the touch screen on my brand new cell phone, she proposed that I get “someone younger” to help me.
It turned out, as I had suspected, the problem had nothing to do with my age, my competence, my technical smarts, or even my aging fingertips. My new phone needed calibrating. It got calibrated, and now it works just fine. (Knock on wood.)
Note to Self: Take a Minute to Chill
In writing that post last week, I broke a rule I’d set for myself years ago. The rule informs both my writing and my outlook on this world of ours. And that is, when feelings of outrage or grievance show up, take a minute to chill.
Grievance and outrage. There’s far too much of it floating around in the ether these days. In conversations among friends. On social media. On cable TV news. And even in the narratives contestants present to the judges on otherwise well thought-out TV shows like “Project Runway.”
It’s as though there’s some weird kind of status you get when you’ve been wronged.
I’d like to see things calm down around here. I’d like to see people talking to each other — with each other. I’d like people on the left side of things as well as on the right side of things to quit inflating their grievances.
The Uses of Outrage
Yes. There’s a lot of injustice out there. In the past and in the present. And grievance and outrage are a good thing in measured doses. Otherwise, there would never have been a civil rights movement, a women’s movement, an anti-Vietnam War movement, or a Stonewall uprising. The human race needs to hang on tight to its capacity for outrage.
What I’m talking about here is knee-jerk outrage. The kind that gives you that frisson of secret satisfaction. The kind that feels so good you want to stoke it and fan it and keep it going.
(Oops. I see that right here, right now I am giving in to my outrage. It’s true. I am outraged at the outrage that has soured American discourse, public and private, for the past five years. I truly am. Mea culpa.)
Those 1970s Male Chauvinists
My personal wariness of grievance and outrage dates to the 1970s, when I was active in the women’s movement. The more I discovered about how women — how I — had been discriminated against, stereotyped, and limited by cultural barriers in work and in love, the angrier and the more outraged I became.
For a few years, I lived on a diet of grievance and outrage — until one day I realized that, although my anger was energizing, it did not actually feel good. Nor was it helping my work life or my love life.
I decided to try something else. Which was that, yes, I might be facing discrimination and diminishment on a daily basis, but I personally was just fine just as I was. I knew it, and it didn’t matter whether anyone else knew it.
Armed with that knowledge, I could set about righting some of the wrongs, the injustices, I saw out there. Thoughtfully. Calmly. Respectfully. And with just enough outrage to keep me awake.
On related topics: “Does Islam Scare You? If So Here’s Why.” And here’s one about Barack Obama, “The Rhetorician in the White House. Or, How I Learned to Love the Passive Voice.”
Thanks for your perspective on this. I completely agree, and it’s really helpful to have an honest, first-hand comparison between the 1970s and today.
I do think right now is a time for some very big outrage… Another thing I’m remembering from the 1970s is the Equal Rights Amendment. It came close to getting passed, but I remember thinking at the time that maybe it wasn’t really needed — the Constitution basically covered women’s rights, along with all the other civil liberties. But maybe women’s rights need to be made clear.
Social media has a lot to do with the mythology that anger and outrage have a place in discourse; They do not. What I find is that people don’t bother to listen to other people. I see it more in the social media postings in the US than anywhere else but it does exist everywhere. When was the last time any of us really listened to someone without trying to interject our own thoughts.
The internet is a tool, but it’s one we’ve become too reliant on as a mouthpiece for our stray feelings. More than ever there is the need for discourse, not just venting of feelings — and for listening to everyone, not just our selected few friends and those we believe to be “correct.”
It is in the nature of human beings to be distrustful of “the other,” but we are allegedly an intelligent species. One obvious tell is to look at that person you think is so wrong, so crazy, so politically incorrect, and possibly so far beneath you in terms of enlightenment and then take another look in the mirror. What you might see in that mirror is the shadow of fear that you will become somehow the very person you fear and hate and denigrate the most.
So true that anger and outrage have crept into public discourse and seem to an acceptable form of conversation for so many of us today. I have to say — outrage and injustice seeking flourished and became acceptable in the 1960s when our generation was protesting the Vietnam War and advocating civil rights. Good causes, but I think we overdid the outrage.
Well said!
So glad to know a reader is getting what I’m trying to say here. Thanks!
Barbara, I appreciate your honesty with yourself and with us!
Carol, Thank you for letting me know!
Outrage is one of the reasons I left social media. Life is now much better for it.
How different? Happier?
Interesting that you took this step… I’m letting some of my earlier — outraged — posts go quiet. I don’t want to feed that beast.
Enjoy your comments and I read them every Sunday. God bless you and yours. Rocque
Thank you, Rocque. So good to hear from you!