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I see people driving down the highway in $80,000 pickups towing $200,000 campers… propulsion strapped here and there. And maybe he’s attached to this caravan of $500,000 toys is a license plate that says “Don’t Step On Me.” I like this as a statement, but by all appearances these people don’t look so badly downtrodden.
Are they angry just because they are angry, or are they angry at certain dangers to humanity? Or are they just afraid of losing what they have and think they deserve? Reminds me of Marlon Brando’s line in “The Wild One” when the unassuming waitress at Bleecker’s Café asks him if he’s rebelling against Bland, the leader of a biker gang.
There are certainly many things to worry about, but you can’t just get stuck in one big worry cloud. It must be about a specific matter. It needs a goal. It needs to be focused, and there seems to be an entire industry created just to focus all that free-range rage. , can focus a person’s anger on blacks, whites, or America going to hell with a hand basket (that person is ambidextrous – fits right or left).
But it serves more than just pissing people off. It’s about distracting people from what they can actually fix by working together and towards what they can destroy by opposing each other. There are also economic aspects of anger, such as increased television ratings and market share for shows, not to mention increased salaries for individual anger merchants. Is there a futures market for wrath like other commodities? wrath is the bitcoin of politics? Anger as a commodity has real value to those who use it because they make real money using it. Keeping people mad is an advantage for anger merchants, and like the snake oil salesmen of old, they’re playing Americans for suckers.
Anger as a political tool is nothing new, but the current rate at which anger spreads and misinformation is created without a corresponding explanation or counterargument. , the way we communicate has changed dramatically, but human nature has not changed. But loyalty, devotion to duty, selflessness, honesty and integrity also remain. But, as the newspaper editors say, “dog bites man” is not news, “man bites dog” is news, and the latter virtue does not sell as well as the former vice.
When someone tells you that you should be angry about something, you need to ask “why.” What are their motives for persuading others to take offense at third parties? For MSNBC and Fox it’s money. If the purpose of anger is to destroy something you don’t like, what’s your plan to replace it with something better or something else?
In the 1970s, the Chicago School of Economists, led by Milton Friedman, believed that if the economic system was destroyed, a new, perfect and ideal system would magically replace it. They tried it in Chile after the assassination of Chile’s first democratically elected president, Miguel Allende, with disastrous results. Well, perfection is in the eye of the beholder, and destroying economies and other systems doesn’t take into account the human suffering that occurs. The wrath merchant of today is no better at proposing solutions to replace what he wishes to destroy than the radical students of the 1960s and his 1970s. If you stop doing what you don’t like, won’t something better happen? Good luck!
Jim Elliott served 16 years as a state legislator and state senator in the Montana legislature. He lives on his trout ranch in his creek.
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