On… Anger
Can we get too angry about the state of the world?
This week I knew that Climate.Emergence had finally ‘made it’ because I was left my first unkind comment online from a complete stranger.
Writing about climate change it was only a matter of time, but what stung was that the comment came not from a climate denier, but from someone who was clearly deeply concerned about climate change.
I can’t tell you much of what the comment actually said because I barely read it before I decided to save my energy and delete it.
But I can tell you that it was full of absolute rage. Complete and utter, devastated, and raw rage at the state of the world and the unfolding climate emergency.
The internet can be a very angry place, and dealing with ‘keyboard warriors’ is an occupational hazard for anyone putting themselves out into the world.
The softly, softly, take good care of yourself whilst you engage with this heavy stuff approach of my last post On… Our Bodies had therefore not gone down at all well.
I felt angry and defensive in response, and I wanted to justify myself.
Don’t you know we’re fighting from the same corner? I wanted to say.
Don’t we have enough battles without turning on each other anyway?
Can’t you see that I’m as angry as you are about this, and I don’t know what to do with how it makes me feel either?
And so, as the US Presidential elections have unfolded in all their drama this week, complete with wild accusations and civil unrest, I’ve been thinking about anger, and what do with the rage we must inevitably all feel on some level about the current state of the world.
Anger and Grief
There is a popular, unattributed quote that has been doing the rounds on the internet;
‘I sat with my anger long enough, until she told me her name was grief.’
That thought was helpful for me because I find it difficult to allow myself to feel angry, even though I know it’s important.
I find anger wild and untamed, powerful and painful. If I were to listen to my anger more I worry that it would take me on all sorts of uncomfortable journeys to reimagine the way life is unfolding.
So, instead, I have often tried to keep a lid on it.
And for that reason, I sometimes find myself feeling superior to those who are much more candid about their anger at the state of the world. At how uncomfortable it makes other people, at what I have perceived as a lack of self-control.
That’s to say that I sometimes deal with the anger I don’t know what to do with by taking refuge in the feeling that at least I’m handling this better than some people.
But the anger is still there inside me, buried deep, of course it is. And, one way or the other, it needs to find expression.
The Vulnerability of Anger
The gift of anger is that it lets us know when boundaries are being crossed and propels us to become clearer about how we want to negotiate our expectations, rights and dreams with the world around us.
But anger is often something that can leave us feeling intensely vulnerable because, being such a hot potato, it can require quite a lot of energy for us to find ways of expressing anger that is constructive and that takes us further towards a solution.
In listening to our anger and deciding to set firmer boundaries, even if it’s entirely reasonable, we are also on some level acknowledging our limitations. Such as, ‘I can’t accept or permit that’, or ‘I can’t do what you’re asking of me.’ And we risk the unknown response that others might have to our saying that.
We also risk the loss of what could have been if we had decided to compromise, just as not setting a boundary risks the loss of what could have been had we protected ourselves better.
And then there is the risk that our boundary may not be respected despite our best efforts, and the impact this can have on us emotionally and physically.
This can be especially hard for those who might have experienced repeated or extreme boundary transgressions in the past. It’s also a particular challenge for those of us fighting against climate change as our requests and admonishments have so often fallen on deaf ears, and that is part of the trauma risk we expose ourselves to when engaging with climate change as I wrote about in last week’s post.
But for all the challenges and complexity that boundary setting brings us, both when we are too unyieding or too resigned, boundaries are exactly what climate change is all about.
Because the planet has set humankind a firm boundary around our relationship to the natural world, and, despite a great deal of patience, we are now facing an increasingly angry planet as those boundaries are transgressed over and over again.
As planetary are transgressed, we face an increasingly angry planet.
And so, because what is happening in the world right now is not right, our effects to rectify those planetary boundary transgressions will require a much closer and more nuanced relationship with anger than we may have previously believed.
The Politics of Anger
When was the last time you heard someone call a white male in a leadership position angry?
This is the question asked by Lisa Fritsch in her TEDx talk, ‘Freedom to be the Angry Black Woman.’
Fritsch, a former Republican candidate for Governor of Texas, makes her audience laugh by heralding Donald Trump as an incredibly successful angry black woman, or ABW.
‘Becoming’ was one of the best books I read last year.
Fritsch compares Trump’s leadership style, seen by his supporters as a sign of strength, with that of Michelle Obama’s who speaks candidly about the lengths she went to in order to avoid any association with her being angry as this would have been seen as a sign of weakness.
Fritsch covers the history of the ABW, and argues for the right for black women to express their anger, not least because the world is in need of the drive, energy and passion that unlocks;
‘I want the freedom to be the angry black woman because I look at where we would be without all the angry black women who have come before us that put progress over posture.’
This is the strength of anger, and, as Fritsch says, it has love at the heart of it.
But, as much as I would love to see Trump’s reaction to being heralded an ABW, on this Fritsch and I probably disagree (though I doubt she is entirely serious).
Because Trump, for me, is the opposite of the healthy anger Fritsch so brilliantly speaks of. He represents all the reasons why anger is to be feared, not celebrated and he has, in the words of Greta Thunberg this week, a serious anger management problem.
The Rage of the Protest Vote
This week the world has watched on in dismay as Trump falsely claimed election fraud, bringing the USA another step closer to widespread civil unrest.
Even Nigel Farage admitted that ‘we are seeing a President who is frustrated’ whilst speaking on the BBC the morning after we all woke up to find that it would be days before the outcome of the election would be decided.
The capacity of Trump to tap into and incite anger, claiming victimhood where there is none, and generating narratives that distract from the root cause of dissatisfaction, is, it seems, never ending.
Which is why he and those seeking political advantage like him, will never run out of ammunition all the time inequality and restlessness exist, because what they offer is not a solution but a distraction.
Healthy anger is a signpost that should take us to the root cause of a problem. But what Trump represents and incites is not anger but something far more dangerous, and far more destructive.
What Trump represents is rage.
If, like me, you were relieved at the result of the US elections, you might want to take this as a sign to savour a rare moment of some good global news. It’s long overdue!
Anger and Rage
Anger and rage are often used interchangeably but they are not all the same thing.
Sue Parker Hall is a UK based therapist and anger management specialist and she summarises the difference between anger and rage like this;
‘Anger is an extremely important emotion… it helps us identify when something is not quite right and needs attention… Rage, however, is disrespectful to others. It doesn’t solve a problem but only serves to make it worse.’
Where as adults we can learn to work with anger as part of a healthy relationship with our own and others’ boundaries, rage connects us with the painful truth we all experience as toddlers when we learn that life does not and cannot always go the way we want.
Rage in adults is therefore what happens when anger has been repressed in some way and has been unable to find healthy expression. And it can be expressed just as much in an explosive outburst as it can in a stone-walled disconnect, which Parker Hall calls, ‘cold rage’.
The Trump campaign has understood how to capitalise on the anger caused by existing political divides in order to incite rage and in doing so generate energy and attention around his campaign.
But rage is of course something that can be experienced regardless of where we sit on the political spectrum, and for climate activists in particular, it’s an occupational hazard.
Because when our efforts are felt to be ignored or impotent and when we feel helpless to fight against something of such colossal importance, the stage is set for rage.
Rage might look like despair- a cold hearted disconnect as we turn away and leave the planet to go to hell in a hand basket- or it might, for example, look like increasingly volatile civil unrest.
When the XR protests were last in full swing back in September, I followed a tweet from the co-founder of Christian Climate Action, Holly-Anna Peterson which resonated with me enormously;
Angry Climate Activists
The majority of protests we currently see from activists are a healthy expression of anger. It might be uncomfortable, and it might not be for everyone, but protest has a rich history of healthily setting boundaries when a society has become unhealthy.
As a climate lobbyist, I have often resisted the stereotype of being an ‘angry climate activist’ because I worked in the world of politics where I saw politicians distancing themselves from anything that would be seen to be too radical.
Instead, I took what could be described more as a ‘bargaining’ approach, which I outlined in my post On… Politics a few weeks ago; I would find out what most interested an elected representative about climate change, and I would frame the issue on those terms.
Simply reframing climate change in that way proved to be remarkably effective in beginning to get politicians to engage, but it only worked because they had already had their attention grabbed by the protests in the streets.
The XR demonstrations, for example, had an enormous impact on politicians’ awareness of climate issues and generated a hunger to engage (or to at least to be seen to engage) where there had not been any previous interest.
The two approaches work well together, a bit like the carrot and the stick.
Protest has a rich history of healthily setting boundaries when a society has become unhealthy.
And over time I am coming to embrace anger as a vital part of building effective relationships in order to influence, even in a ‘bargaining’ setting, because it’s part of our ongoing relationship with each other, both as individuals and on a larger, societal scale.
I have come to understand that where rage is to be avoided because it says, ‘I will seek only to have power over you or to remove you because of the threat you pose to me’, anger serves us by saying, ‘I believe things can be better and I believe you can do better, which is what I demand of you, for both of our sakes.’
The Right Response to Climate Change
Anger and bargaining are two of several responses to the climate crisis that are outlined in an excellent short film by Bill Finnegan called ‘After Denial’.
The film follows the maker’s conversations with his own climate denying parents, to the activism of street protests in New York, to the UN climate summits, to climate grief discussion groups, and finally to creative expression.
The film is based on the idea of the Five Stages of Grief- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance- but the various strands of the climate movement which the film powerfully lays side by side are of course complimentary, fluid, and non-linear.
Depending on our personalities, life experiences, and where we currently are in our lives, we will each of us find ourselves more naturally drawn to some responses than others at any one time.
It’s easy to get caught up in justifying why one response is better than another, and for sure some are certainly more and less helpful in different contexts, but what really matters is that we continue to engage.
That our rage does not get the better of us, causing us to disconnect, disrupting our ability to collaborate or clouding strategic thinking.
And that is exactly why so much of my writing focuses on self-care, so that the toll that this engagement takes on us mentally and sometimes physically does not overwhelm us. And so that it does not put other people off from engaging too.
Self-Care and Planet Care
My final resource recommendation for this week is a half-hour piece on BBC Radio 4 called ‘Radical Self-Care’.
The program returns to the origins of self-care, including a political movement led by people of colour in the 70’s that resisted racial discrimination in healthcare.
Self-care as defined under these terms is not about making ourselves feel nice and advancing our individual position in the world (the criticism that the programme’s host, Shahidha Bari, makes of today’s self-care craze), but it is instead about power; who is looked after, and who is left to fend for themselves.
Self-care is therefore a collective endeavour, and it is, in the words of Bari, about ‘the right to be well.’
That right extends beyond our own lives and into our communities, to other species, and to the planet as a whole. And self-care was birthed from the anger of knowing that this right had not been respected, and that it is a challenge that persists more than ever today.
The right to wellness extends beyond humans and to all life (and here is the obligatory animals photo of my blog posts.)
So, is it possible to feel too much anger? I don’t this so.
We should feel angry at the state of the world, and we should be holding those with influence and power to account, inviting them with every constructive means available to us to do better, to become better.
But we must be wary of allowing anger to morph into a sense of victimhood that would leave us disconnected, immobilised, or even incited to violence (verbal or otherwise) by rage. That is both when we see it in others, whether that’s the tantrums of the former US President or a random online comment from a keyboard warrior, and also when we notice it’s lure within ourselves.
And if we feel the hopeless rage of despair welling within us, we can know that it is time to set some boundaries of our own and take some care of ourselves.
Even if it feels like we don’t have time, even if the rage itself is reasonable given what is at stake.
Because more rage isn’t going to get us anywhere good. It’s on the rise in much of our political life, and it will be one of the biggest obstacles to navigating together the challenging times ahead.
The new President of the United States of America, like the rest of us, has got his work cut out.
About Me I’m Jo,
formerly the founder Director of national climate change charity, Hope for the Future. I am currently researching eco-anxiety and how we can build emotional resilience in our response to the climate emergency.
Welcome to Climate.Emergence- a place to emotionally process what on earth is happening to us and our planet.