A year ago, as the presidential campaign was winding down, passions were being stirred up to a frenzy by hate-mongers, not to mention certain politicians themselves, who mounted ever-increasing attacks on Barack Obama. By appealing to people’s fears, they insinuated that Obama was a terrorist – guilty by association – and that he was really a Muslim, posing as a Christian in disguise. More recently, we have seen placards equating Obama with Hitler, but as Jimmy Carter just pointed out, and what many of us were already thinking, this is all code language to avoid articulating the real offense, in the eyes of racist Americans, that Obama is simply guilty of being an African-American.
Meanwhile, he has been identified, instead, as soft on abortion, an ally of gays and lesbians, friendly to immigrants, and, perhaps worst of all, tolerant of non-believing secular humanists. The result of this demagoguery has been to inflame the crowds. The only thing missing was that they weren’t also handing out pitchforks and organizing lynch mobs (though some now do carry guns to their rallies) and recent Town Hall meetings have gotten so combustible that you think they are about to explode.
As a spectator watching all of this safely at home on TV, I have been appalled and also frightened. I can’t imagine how scary it might feel to be there on the scene. I have wondered how people could get so stirred up. And I asked myself, Is this what happened in Nazi Germany? I also understood that the anger I witnessed stirred up not just my fears, but also my own anger at the perpetrators of these hate rallies, and at those who signed on to them. Anger can be contagious and hard to contain.
This past July my passions were aroused again when I briefly watched the Judge Sotomayor hearings. I wanted to reach into the television set and throttle some of those Republican senators for their smarmy and isrespectful line of questioning and outrageous efforts to smear Judge Sotomayor as a racist, which only to seemed to reveal their own bigotry.
We also witnessed over the summer yet another elected official who got in trouble with inappropriate sexual behavior, a serious offense in its own right. But what made this incident most damning was the hypocrisy of this man, and those like him, who preach family values and condemn others for the very acts that they commit. As Rachel Maddow put it so trenchantly, ”Moral superiority isn’t a prerequisite for public service but it is a prerequisite for those public servants who publicly claim that they are morally superior.”
And yet they remain in office, and I wonder what to do with my frustration and my anger.
We are in a time of economic crisis. The stock market may be climbing back up again, but the staggering unemployment figures paint a different picture. Many feel a sense of injustice and unfairness at the irresponsibility and greed of the financial industry and the lack of oversight. People we know have been laid off, had salaries docked, seen their savings nosedive. Fear and resentment fuel anger, depression, and inertia. In the face of this situation, how do we get on with our lives and, in many cases, re-build them?
And finally and perhaps most importantly, putting aside politics and putting aside the economy, we may also be burdened by feelings of self-accusation and anger turned inward – or towards those we love: for making poor choices, for passing up opportunities, for having too much trust, for having too little trust, for impatience, for treating someone unfairly, for taking a hostile attitude, for being stuck in a state of despair, or pain, for losing our cool and our self-control. We can and do blame others all the time, but what do we do with the blame we have for ourselves, for our own misconduct, our poor judgment, our failure to take responsibility.
There is a Yiddish expression, “Der tsoren iz in hartsen a doren.” “Anger is like a thorn in the heart.” And another says, “Der ka’as un der tsoren farkirtzen di yoren.” “Bad temper and anger shorten the years.”
The author of Ecclesiastes likewise cautioned us not to be quick to anger, or, we might add, self-recrimination. But it may be much easier said than done. It’s quite a challenge. How do we manage these feelings without denying them and also without letting them eat us up or exploding in destructive ways?
We’ve invited one of our members, Ilana Gruebel, to contemplate these questions and bring her own calm insights to these matters. Following her presentation we will welcome further non-inflammatory comments from the audience.
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