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.

To Tell the Truth

When I first heard about the attempted rape allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, it was eye-roll time for me. “Oh, God, not another one of those things!” and more than a little skepticism followed when I heard it was about drunken behavior at a high school party three decades ago where the participants were minors. I attended upscale, all-male institutions myself right through college, and the concept of a privileged young man feeling entitled to take advantage of a young woman after the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol was not exactly new. This case is NOT Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill 2.0. Nevertheless, out came the historic video clips, and we cable news junkies had to live through that all over again.

Did what happened to Christine Blasey Ford qualify as a #metoo? In those cases, the downfall of highly placed men has come after the establishment of a pattern of bad behavior. In this particular case, there is no such pattern, at least not yet. But Dr. Ford has a point.  We need an investigation to get to the truth, or very close to it,  before she testifies to the Senate committee. She says he did it; Judge Kavanaugh says he didn’t. Both can’t be right. I am not trying to minimize the damage done to Dr. Ford as a teen and what she is going through now. It’s awful. But the simple question remains: Did he do it?

 As for disturbing patterns, though, there already appears to be one in Kavanaugh’s case -- questions about his relationship with the truth, which have come up during his confirmation hearing. We all may have different evaluations of the behavioral excesses of a drunken teenage boy, but veracity certainly does have a bearing on whether this man is qualified for the Supreme Court.

It’s the timing that stinks more than anything here. The Republicans wouldn’t even consider President Obama’s pick of Merrick Garland to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, choosing instead to wait till after a new President took office. There should be a similar delay now until a new Congress is seated. This is a fairness no-brainer.