Wednesday, March 26, 2008

The New Anger Movement


People have remarkable memories. Some memories and bitterness linger on for generations. Armenians to this day have strong dislike and or hate for the Turks. There have been factions in the Arab world who have a thousand plus years of hating their neighbors. The Jews have been the whipping post for generational hate as well. The French and the English have been at odds for years.

Closer to home, though World War II has been over sixty years, I still occasionally hear anti Japanese or German sentiment from Americans. Though slavery ended over a hundred and fifty years ago, there is still a residual bad feelings not only from relatives of the slaves that are six or seven generations removed from those horrors, but also from the relatives that are six or seven generations removed from the confederacy. The confederate flag is still flown with pride in many southern states in a pissed off defiance.

There is a generation who are still bitter that George Bush was appointed President by the Supreme Court, and they are bitter that he won the election four years later. There are people still bitter about Richard Nixon.

People carry the hurts and the scars of their childhood right up until the day they die. We carry anger for things that have happened to our families, friends and neighbors. Yet we wonder why election losers remain bitter. Every body is pissed off and it doesn’t go away when an election is over. Professional politicians say that they are able to shake it off and accept their loss, but somehow I think those polite days of politics are long over. Fanatical supporters carry the torch using the Internet as a weapon of slander and defamation. Failed campaigns take on a life of their own with the monsters that reside within the faithful. “Game over / move on” is a lost concept and has been replaced by spite, revenge and ill will that is sometimes carried to the grave.

This new unforgiving nature calls like a crow for a new field of psychology; political anger management psychological therapy. There are so many who are in need of this therapy. A key to the therapy would be to get the opposition to better understand any possible benefits of opposing proposals. One doesn’t need to embrace the concepts, but they should use reasoning to see that the concepts will do some good somewhere down the line as they were envisioned.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Forgiveness is hard when the guy telling you to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps is doing so as he drives by in the car he bought from great-grand dad's trust fund. When your screaming at MY kid for playing his stereo too loud in the neighborhood you just moved into, when you are keeping out the industries that will pay for my kids' education and help this county through the recession. Forgiveness is expensive. Mine is for sale. I become a lot more bitter about who I am forgiving when my kids going hungry so yours can putt around partying out on the islands.

* the "yous" in this post are to any of "you" that it pertains.

Anonymous said...

I think anger and fear are both tools that people learn to use when they want power.

That is the biggest fault I can find with these county commissioners. They aren't politically motivated enough and have refused to use these tools. They should have used the fear card more often and the anger card. Just think how they could have all these people eating out of the palm of their hand if they had whipped the ignorant up in a frenzy of fear against LNG and whipped the fanatics up into a frenzy of hatred against LNG.

What a bunch of idealistic idiots to think of the economic benefits of the future. They should know what we are after is What Are You Doing For ME Today? Until they realize who they are dealing with they are going to continue to get what they deserve.