Anger Management

This past week I heard and watched several radio and TV programs devoted to women’s rage – not only what they were angry about, but whether they were allowed to be angry at all, as women have traditionally been raised to be nice and to keep the boat afloat instead of rocking it. Those days are clearly over.

I’m angry too, maybe for slightly different reasons. The way I look at it, the whole Brett Kavanaugh drama was unnecessary. I’m angry at whoever it was that leaked Christine Blasey Ford’s confidential information about sexual assault, virtually forcing her to testify. I’m angry that President Trump didn’t pull the Kavanaugh nomination early on, or that Kavanaugh himself didn’t withdraw, which he could have done without having to admit to any wrongdoing and save us all this grief . I’m angry that President Obama wasn’t afforded the opportunity to have his own Supreme Court nominee considered a year and a half ago, and wonder whether some of the arcane rules of the Senate and perhaps the House that permit such manipulations are constitutional.

But I’m willing to accept that maybe all this WAS necessary. We seem to be going through a period of what 19^th century religious leader Mary Baker Eddy called a “moral chemicalization,” when the tolerance for wrongs protected by practice or tradition runs out. It happened with taxation without representation, with slavery, with women being denied the vote and gays being denied marriage, with bullying, and now with sexual violence. Like the guy in the movie, women are saying, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

Upheavals happen in nature all the time. Take earthquakes, hurricanes, even forest fires. They are not about God taking out His or Her anger out on us sinful humans here below (sorry for the gender binarization). They’re about relieving stress and restoring balance. It is never a comfortable process, and isn’t supposed to be. The explosion or eruption seems sudden, but the tensions leading up to it have been building for a long time. Like a pain that suddenly appears in our body, it says, “Pay attention to me!”

This is where we have a choice. We can stew in our anger, or we can fix what’s broken, channeling the anger into doing the repair work. Our founding fathers (yeah, the ones who made it into the history books were male), left us the tools to do it, and the next opportunity comes in November. But elections are not just about beating the other guys and racing to the opposite extreme. We have to think of them as a way to restore balance. After all, If we rock the boat too hard, we all drown.

Permanent Record

Those of us of a certain age will remember the times in our youth when our parents warned us, “Don’t do anything bad at school. You don’t want it to be on your permanent record!” What was this exactly? In those days, perhaps, we thought of it as a paper document which followed us forever, transported by some unknown handler to the next school or even workplace in a Manila envelope. It could never be altered in any way, so any dings acquired in our life’s journey would be there forever, along with the good stuff.

When we prepared a resume, or if we were really fancy, a CV (I always wanted one of those!), we naturally tried to shine the best light on ourselves. We left out the missteps, hoping the employer wouldn’t find us out. Depending on the position we were seeking, the resume might be accepted at face value, and if we performed well in the interview, and the references we supplied said that we walked on water, we got the job. For some positions, though, the background checks were more serious. I am reminded of the female radio talk show host, who received a marriage proposal from a successful businessman she’d been seeing. She would not say yes until he showed her his tax returns for the previous three years.

Of course, it is much harder now to skate by, as there really IS a permanent record for young people, thanks to social media. But in the darker ages, fact-finding was more difficult. A consistent theme in a novel I finished a few years ago was: “You really don’t know people.” The late writer Anais Nin used to say that if a hundred people who knew her were to write biographies of her, there would be a hundred different versions of her life, depending on what each writer saw.

Sometimes, the last snapshot someone took of us might be an ugly one. The other 99 people might think we are a paragon of rectitude – but there’s that one, or more than one, we offended, disrespected, or even injured. Have we apologized, even if we don’t remember what happened, or do we continue to feed the good-guy or girl myth, even believing it ourselves? We may or may not be suitable candidates for the United States Supreme Court, or President, or Pope, and maybe we just have to admit that and move on. We have a much better shot at forgiveness, though, if we just own up to our checkered past and accept being human.