Living off the rage

The restaurant was quiet, despite its being the lunch hour. The rain came down outside, no doubt part of the reason for the low turnout.

We hadn’t seen each other for a while and were catching up in that meandering, slow way friends do. Here is what her son did, and here are the pictures. Here are pictures of our cats, and did you hear about so and so?

Like that.

Eventually, we got to the current political chaos. It feels like that is the subject of a lot of conversations I have these days. How did we get here? How do we fight back? What can we do?

This led to different people we know doing various kinds of work around this, including one person in particular I think of as The Instagram Activist.

They are at every protest. Their Instagram page is filled with the hashtag de jour. They have an instant opinion on every issue, despite their lack of knowledge of the issue. From matters as wide-ranging as labor policy to race to LGBT issues to food accessibility, they are out in front of the cameras, giving their solutions. They show up at city council and school board meetings with a camera, trying to play gotcha with board members. They have selfies with every significant Civil Rights personality.

And whenever I mention this person to anyone, all people talk about is how angry this person is. No local politician will take their call or trust them with a meeting. All they have is rage.

But here’s the thing—the whole anger thing is a public persona. I’ve spent a fair amount of time with them one on one, and they are not like that at all when the cameras are off.

“They are angry for a living,” I said to my friend at lunch that day.  

She laughed and said that was exactly it.

“They are so caught up in the way it is, they don’t have a plan for what it could be like. They are not giving birth to anything; they are just living off the rage,” she said.

I know lots of folks who are living off the rage. Their Facebook feed is filled with “I told you so” posts. Outrage at the current administration leads them to fat-shame people who disagree with them. They are so mad they call other people who disagree with them names or slurs. The world is broken up into two camps, with the dividing mark being whether you agree with them. They are right; you are wrong. No curiosity, no nuance. Just rage.

Some people just like to fight, and are so busy fighting they never stopped to ask what they are fighting for. What happens if you win?

In May of 1780, John Adams was in Paris, trying to get help from the French government for the American colonies, then in the middle of the Revolutionary War. In a letter to his wife Abigail, he said,   

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

I want to be clear: I hate war, and every war results from a failure of imagination. But at least Adams knew what he was fighting for. There was a larger vision at work than just “owning the [political party I oppose]”.

Don’t tell me what you are against: what are you for?

Don’t tell us what you want to destroy: what do you want to build?

I don’t want to know what you hate: let us know what you love.