Anger in the body politic

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning — an euphemism for feeling quick to anger.

My own anger on this day is more of the free-floating, non-political kind, but it occurs to me that there is a huge amount of political anger in the air as well.

In the political arena, we Democrats on the progressive left are currently expressing great anger at President-elect Donald Trump's appointment of Stephen K. Bannon as his chief White House strategist. Mr. Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News. He once declared the site "the platform for the alt-right." The alt-right has been said to be associated with white supremacism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Semitism.

Let's pretend for the moment that I am in that group of Donald Trump supporters that gravitate to the alt-right. I expect I would be motivated by anger at all the things that have made me feel marginalized and powerless. There are many such things, and many have nothing to do with people who do not look and act like me. Washington, New York, and the other big cities have lost sight of my needs, as the bigwigs who live there fly over my little towns and rural abodes on their way to yet another distant power luncheon. I don't feel I have economic security any more. Our universities are teaching our youngsters — the ones who are lucky enough to attend them — to, again, be insensitive to the beliefs and needs of folks like me. It all makes me angrier than I can remember being at any point in my life.

So, what about all those folks who don't act and look like me? The power elites coddle them, so I believe, while I get ignored. Accordingly, my anger spills over onto them.

OK, now I'll stop pretending I'm an alt-right enthusiast and go back to being me ...

Many of the commentators I read on the left are livid because Trump, whose rhetoric during the campaign was often hateful, appointed Bannon. Again, anger rears its ugly head in the political arena. And I have to wonder if many of those angry pundits on the left also have a storehouse of non-political anger built up in their system. My guess is they do.

Anger seems endemic to our society and culture today. At some point I think we have to admit that we've become addicted to anger. And a lot of that anger is free-floating and non-political.

My thought here is that political/free-floating anger in the society and culture are bound to spill over into racial hatred, xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc. So if we on the left want to end such bigotries, we need to figure out a strategy that can damp down America's anger.