Why Angry?

It occurs to me there is a connection between those Americans who are angry and the blog piece I wrote about losing control of one's life to Alzheimer’s.

Perhaps those Americans who protest vaccines and masks are also angry about losing control. Why do they think that way? Because nothing is the way it used to be. The rules about the world are changing and change is challenging. Writing from earthquake country, I know that when the very ground shifts beneath you, a kind of panic sets in. Your anchoring frame of reference is gone and you feel adrift. As in Alzheimer’s, what you thought of as real and solid and true, isn’t any more. It is logical to feel anger at whomever you can blame. In a real earthquake we can only shake our hand at the gods, or God, or Mother Nature. But when it comes to human-created environments, it’s natural to seek the people or organizations responsible for taking away your sense of stability.

It is natural to protect our tribe and blame Outsiders for our troubles.  

When jobs are lost, or a pandemic strikes, we look for someone to blame, the Boss, the Company, Automation, Immigrants, Politicians (of any stripe), Racism, China. Someone must be held accountable for the loss, for the upheaval, for the instability. It is much easier to blame those who are not like us, those whose faces don’t resemble our family, our tribe. 

Even if they look like members of our tribe, those who don’t think like us can also be looked down on as Outsiders. If we start excluding those who don’t think like us, act like us, talk like us, walk like us, run like us, eat like us, play like us . . . the circle of our lives closes in so that we narrow our own choices, constrain our own freedoms, dig our own graves.

What is missing is the recognition that underneath skin color, social manners, political/religious beliefs, food preferences, we are all humans in the same “tribe”. If sad, we cry. If happy, we smile. If hungry, we eat. If thirsty, we drink. If cut, we all bleed red blood.

So what do we do with the frustration, the anger at the changes around us? How do we regain a feeling of control over our lives? How can we do that without endangering our fellow human beings?