David Culver, Telling It Like It Is

To those who may be uncomfortable with my anger and/or dislike my way of expressing it occasionally, I’m asking you to give me the opportunity to defend myself.

Sadly, nearly all of what goes on in our world is evil in one of its many forms: wars, massacres, genocide, injustice, corruption, greed, ignorance, apathy, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. And anger is an appropriate response to all of it. As Thomas Aquinas wrote, “He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.”

Anger at evil and expressing it is a major biblical theme. Moses was angry when he came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments and saw the people worshipping the Golden Calf, angry enough to smash the two tablets on which they were written. The Old Testament prophets were angry. You cannot read Isaiah, Hosea, Jeremiah, etc. without dealing with a lot of their justifiable anger as they ranted against the evils of their day.

Christ’s precursor, John the Baptizer, was angry with the religious and secular leaders of his day. When the temple leaders came to see him on the day he baptized the Christ, an accurate contemporary translation of his question to them would be, “What are you a**holes doing here?”

Jesus was angry. “Scribes! Pharisees! Hypocrites!” is a phrase he repeated over and over in a memorable rant. And a tremendous amount of anger is described in the words and portrayed in the pictures of the time he whipped the moneylenders from the temple, enough to get him crucified less than a week after it happened!

In my understanding, anger and hate are not the same thing. Anger is an emotion and hate is a behavior. While there’s a very fine line between the two, and they often appear together, they are separate and distinct: I can be angry with someone without hating them.

A look in Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary will help clarify my point. Words used to describe anger are wrath, fury, rage, ire, passion, and forcefulness. Words used to describe hate are disposed to injury, evil disposition, malevolent, spiteful, offensive, disgusting.

Profanity is the language of anger. Like chili pepper, profanity turns up the heat (anger wrath, fury, rage, ire, passion, forcefulness) of what is being expressed. Kirby Larson, an award-winning author, said, “There is nothing like the occasional outburst of profanity to calm jangled nerves.” And many of us are familiar with Mark Twain’s thoughts on the subject: “In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.”

Words are neutral, neither good nor bad in and of themselves. Responsible, knowledgeable linguists will back up George Carlin’s assertion; “There are no such thing as bad words. Bad thoughts, perhaps; bad intentions, maybe. But no bad words.” It is sheer stupidity to assert that, out of approximately 400,000 words in the English language, there are seven words that are “bad.”

Edmund Burke, British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker stated, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing (or, as I add, the wrong thing).” And not expressing anger when appropriate is clearly doing nothing (or the wrong thing); thus fostering and supporting evil (immorality in Aquinas’ words).

This idea of evil filling in the vacuum created by the absence of good is what George Monbiot, an English writer, is trying to get across in his article “Right’s Stupidity Spreads, Enabled by Too-Polite Left” < http://www.evergreenedigest.org/special-project-archives-rights-stupidity-spreads-enabled-too-polite-left>. “Self-deprecating, too liberal for their own good, today’s progressives stand back and watch, hands over their mouths, as the social vivisectionists of the right slice up a living society to see if its component parts can survive in isolation. Tied up in knots of reticence and self-doubt, they will not shout stop. Doing so requires an act of interruption, of presumption, for which they no longer possess a vocabulary.”

In other words, fellow Lefties, in the words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Not the evildoers, not the right, not the neocons, not the Michele Bachmans and Rush Limbaughs, but us, and our reticence to put up a fuss!

So stamp your feet or mutter or do something so the world will know you’re there, huh? Not getting angry when necessary is a betrayal … of your principles, your causes, your fellow human beings, your faith, and your values. It’s time to stop walking around with a blank stare on your face so no one will know your head’s asleep!

Anger in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.