Anger Is The Road To Hell & Fear Is It's On-Ramp

"I'm underneath the street light
but the light of joy I know
Scared beyond belief way down in the shadows

And the perverted fear of violence

Chokes a smile on every face

And common sense is ringing out the bell

This ain't no technological breakdown

Oh no, this is the road to Hell..."

                                                    - Chris Rea

I write quite frequently about how polarized we have become as a society. Usually I use politics and government to try and illustrate that polarization but not always. This is one of those ‘not always’ moments.

Around the world, people are angry. There are protests against the other side, whatever the other side may be. We're so angry that we seldom march in support  of something now.

We’re just too angry for that.

We’re angry about the conservative agenda. We’re angry about the left’s constant squandering of our fiscal resources on things we can’t afford. We’re angry about crime and we’re angry about attempts to make crime an issue and the introduction of laws to combat it.

We’re very angry with whoever is the current prime minister, president or premier or governor. It doesn’t matter which side of the political spectrum they represent, left or right, a large part of the population is outraged.

We’re angry with banks and Wall Street. We’re equally as angry with environmentalists, the Occupy movement and protesting students. We’re angry with large corporations and with celebrities. We’re angry about unemployment, the high cost of gas and with striking unions.

We’re so angry when our team loses, we not only protest, we tear up our cities as hockey fans did in Vancouver last year and soccer fans did recently in Greece and Egypt. Protest marches, riots, hate messages and violence have become the preferred means to express our anger. 

Our reaction to everything now is a visceral, knee-jerk response of judgement, outrage and a seething, accusatory anger. We are so angry, we seldom wait for the facts anymore and we do nothing to address the causes of that anger because I believe that we haven’t correctly identified where it comes from.

As any first-year psychology student can tell you, anger is a secondary emotion. It means that the anger inside us is the result of something more fundamental that we're feeling. It is a reaction to something more profound. It could be a reaction to intolerance, to feeling betrayed or any one of dozens of other emotions but I think the primary cause now is fear.

We’re afraid.

Since 9/11 that fear has become omnipresent and while it started with a fear of terrorism it has expanded to a fear of just about everything including our own governments and even each other.

A young black man is shot and we immediately polarize and turn his tragic death into a political circus. The usual national ‘leaders’ speak out, coming down on one side or the other of the issue further dividing us by playing to our fears and our anger.

To what purpose? 

How is our society improved by this? How are we brought together and united to resolve the issues facing our societies or even just to mourn together a tragic loss of life? The simple truth is that we aren’t and it becomes one more moment, frozen in time, where we yell and scream at each other in an attempt to get our opinion heard and our position accepted.

September 11 was a horror that froze all of us in that moment. It happened in the United States but Canadians and people from other countries died when the towers came down. It affected people in countries all over the world. It wasn’t just the message that nowhere was truly safe anymore; it was the brazen magnitude of the attack. It was something beyond our imagining and it had happened. Terrorism was no longer something that happened to others and that we read about in the newspaper. It was here. It was real and it was now.

That day gave us a profound sense of vulnerability and powerlessness that we now hide behind our anger.

We’ve never been the same since. We have become suspicious of everything and everyone and it has made us angry. It is that anger that is more of a threat to us than any terrorist attack could ever hope to be. It divides us and that division prevents us from not only facing common threats but in achieving the things that once made our societies the envy of those who lived under oppressive regimes.

It is our anger that oppresses us now. We’re oppressed by fears we don’t want to admit and the anger that fear breeds. In the end, it is that anger that will defeat us. It is eroding our values, our principles and our faith in our way of life. 

If that anger continues to grow, those who wanted to destroy us have already won. They won’t have to do any more than they already have; they can just sit back and watch us destroy ourselves out of the anger behind which we hide our fear.

Our democracies were founded in a belief that we could build something better, a New Jerusalem but in our anger, we have strayed onto the road to perdition. If we don't soon find the courage to no longer be afraid, our own anger will do to us what no external threat ever could.

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