What Anger is For

Enough of us listening to our anger as a guide rather than an impulse could build worlds not shaped by opulent wealth and power. Places to live connected to other places in rational, kind, and reliable ways. The means of survival — food, housing, water, energy — created, controlled, and managed locally rather than by bloated capitalists, senseless bureaucracies, and faceless algorithms. Leaders asking not how to restrain and suppress the anger of the people, but rather how to hear what it is we’re telling them.

I was furious yesterday.

I don’t really get angry. Not really. I get frustrated, sure, and irritated. Especially, I get disappointed, which I think is really what anger starts out as for most people.

A friend cancels plans with me for the fifth time in a row, telling me he’s busy, doesn’t have time for me, really wish he did, then other friends tell you they saw him at a party. That disappoints me, frustrates me, irritates me. But it doesn’t anger me, it informs me.

Someone doesn’t hold up an agreement he made, one he insisted upon, so I’m left doing extra work I’d been assured I wouldn’t need to do for him. Again: disappointment. Frustration. But especially information.

In such cases, I learn something. I learn how committed the other is, how organized, how self-aware. How reliable his statements are, how trustworthy his agreements. Were I not to learn that, were I to miss what else is being said in the disappointment, then I’d imagine I’d get angry. And that anger would be information, too: an awareness of how I’d missed the earlier information.

But sometimes, I do get angry. In fact, I got really fucking enraged yesterday, because there will be no buses in or out of my village for the next two weeks.

Some rich person sold a large tract of land in our village to even richer people. Those richer people are building houses on the land to sell to other rich people. Lots of wealth exchanging hands, all for another cluster of bland homes less interesting than filing cabinets. And to build those homes, the government needs to build them all a road. And to build that road, the government shut down a larger road. And shutting down that larger road means rerouting all the traffic that uses it so that some rich people can get richer.

As you certainly must know, I don’t drive. I’ve never driven, and I never wanted to. I’ve always chosen to live places where that’s possible, in walkable cities or in smaller places with reliable public transit. For a few years here, the transit was reliable and frequent enough that not paying out absurd amounts of money to own and run a car felt like a thing the government recognized as a valid way of living.

But the rich people need more wealth, and the road will be shut down, and the government cancelled all the bus stops in the village with no replacement options. So I wrote a furious email:

Hi there,

According to a notice on the bus stop Rodenbourg am Duerf, the 350 will not stop here for two weeks.

What is the replacement bus option? I do not drive and I rely on this bus to get to Junglinster.

Please let me know what provisions were made for me and the other villagers of Rodenbourg who rely on public transportation during these two weeks. Otherwise we are stranded.

Rhyd Wildermuth-Waltmans

I’ve been told it doesn’t seem so angry. And perhaps you’re bemused at how short the road closure is. No buses for two weeks. That’s all. Hardly the end of the world. And yet I wanted to scream, and bury bits of plants and bones whispered over during a dark moon under the asphalt they’re laying to ensure their plans come to misfortune.

When you think like a government, their decision makes perfect sense. It’s only immigrants affected by this. There’s a social service building in this village that cannot be accessed by bus for two weeks, and the immigrants who clean the houses of my neighbors won’t be able to get to work. But I work from home, so I’m not in danger of losing employment because of their planning. And the government will get a lot more tax money when these new rich people move in, and the public transportation system is already a costly burden to its dwindling tax base, and no doubt the developer is a friend or cousin of the person who approved the closure, so who the fuck cares about me and the handful of others affected by this, those of us too stupid or poor to to participate in capitalism the way we’re supposed to?

You see? I get angry.

And to be clear, I can walk. My feet and legs work fine, great even. Sure, there are no pedestrian routes between my village and the next two villages, but I could walk or bike along the road anyway, even though I’ve been run off those roads too many times to count, several times riding my bike into a tree to save myself from a distracted driver too eager to get home from work to give attention to the guy on the street.

And that’s what I’ll do for the next two weeks. I can walk. I like walking.

So why am I angry?

I’m actually angry because of a fat kid soaked in his own sweat, walking five miles each way to a grocery store in the sticky and oppressive humid heat of South Florida because we were too poor to have a car.

Actually, I’d forgotten about him until the government cancelling a bus for two weeks reminded me. And that’s actually why I’m angry. I’m angry because I remember him, and I’d been forgetting him until now.

Honestly, my adolescence was shit. When my schizophrenic and developmentally-disabled mother divorced my bipolar and violent father, we moved from a dilapidated shack in Appalachia to live with my uncle in the opulently wealthy town of Naples, Florida. Not long after, he kicked us out, leaving my mother, my two younger sisters, and me to fend for our selves. We made do. My mother got a job at McDonald’s, and then got fired so got a job at Burger King. We found a tiny apartment with the help of one of my mother’s few friends.

But we had no car, and there was no public transportation, and neighbors weren’t what you’d call neighborly, so we had to walk a lot. Walking in the two months of “winter” in South Florida was decently pleasant, even if it was five miles each way to the grocery store along a massive eight-lane arterial street roaring with cars. The other ten months are miserable, but the worst are the six months when humidity hovers at 90%, and 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) feels cool. Most of your sweat doesn’t evaporate, it just soaks your clothes until you finally make it to the air conditioned grocery store, sopping wet and freezing the moment you enter.

But the worst were the looks of pity and disgust. The shabbily-dressed poor kids, sun-burnt and sweaty, clutching wet coupons and a bag full of change, trying to turn $20 into a week’s worth of food.

I got good at that part, sure. I also got good at ignoring the stares and choked-back laughter, the shaken heads and condescending sighs. But that kid saw and heard them anyway.

I honestly didn’t notice he was still here until the government cancelled the only public transport option available to me. I love walking, but I’m furious I have no other choice, and suddenly: I’m that impoverished kid again trying to scrape up change for groceries before trekking through the swampy heat as floods of rich people drive past me.

I’m glad that kid’s still here, because he’s the one who got angry, and he was angry for me.

Because I was so angry back then, I shaped my entire life around never needing a car. As soon as I could get out of south Florida, I did, and every place I lived in after that was a place where walking wasn’t an arduous trek of despair, but rather one of whimsical, bodily joy. Neighborhoods through which I could stroll and meander and wander. Cities where everything you really needed was close, where other things could be gotten to by bus, where you were never stranded and always independent, and especially where opulent wealth wasn’t the only thing around you.

My entire adult life, I’ve put myself in such places, at least until Luxembourg. For the last six years, I’ve instead been in a hyper-capitalist fantasy land. Sure, it’s full of forests and fields, castles and cows. It’s also absurdly rich, and full of the kinds of empty people opulent wealth creates. Money-glutted zombies wandering soullessly from one flute of crèmant to the next, with little else to speak of except their previous vacation or their next and what new car they intend to buy.

It’s all been wearing on my soul, but I only noticed it when that bus got cancelled. I didn’t notice how much effort has gone into trying to be myself in such a place until a core foundation of all that work was temporarily kicked out from beneath me. I could be in this place and still get what I want and need, as long as there was a bus to take me there, but from today until the end of this month, there’s none.

That sweating fat kid walking to the grocery store through the thick soup of south Florida summer is angry. He’s angry for me, not at me. He’s enraged for how unnecessarily hard things are made for people who don’t give over their entire lives to increasing the wealth of others just so that they can have a little bit of it, too. He’s angry at the government’s reply this morning, a non-reply, “There were no provisions made … thank you for your understanding.”

I “understand,” yes. But what I understand isn’t what they’d like me to understand.

I understand that my anger is a guide, and a good one.

I understand what more I need to make possible in my life, and how little I can rely on collapsing governments to keep up the barest minimum of society.

I understand that it’s going to be like this more and more. I listen already to the stories of my friends in the UK, waiting three weeks for a basic doctor’s appointment, spending an extra hour waiting for a train, seeing the costs of water and electricity skyrocket while their wages don’t budge. My German friends laughing bitterly at how useless it is to even think of taking a train. My French friends scrambling to find even the most menial of work. My American friends in their forties moving back in with parents just to have a place to live.

Collapse starts slow and then just keeps going and going. Already, this cancelled bus was a vastly-reduced version of its previous self. Just a few years ago, it would have been ridiculous not to use it. But service was cut, and then cut again, even as the village grows and its population increases. And now who cares that it doesn’t run for two weeks?

It’s not just the buses, of course. Here in Luxembourg, the health system is only kept afloat by taxes paid by temporary workers who are pushed out before they can really use the system. Roads and highways become parking lots every morning because the public transport is so useless. And even the socialist politicians here think the poor need to pay more taxes to keep the system afloat because, of course, those politicians are very rich themselves.

The progression of anger starts at frustration and then disappointment. Listen to it then and the anger abates. You correct your expectations, learn to be more flexible in your plans, and especially learn what (and who) is reliable and what (and who) is not.

Ignore it and it builds until it turns to rage as it did for me yesterday. Sure, that rage was quite benign, but that’s just who I’ve chosen to be in this world. I’ve chosen to try to listen to my frustration before it becomes disappointment. Failing that, I’ve chosen to try to listen to the disappointment before it becomes anger. And when that fails, I’ve chosen to listen to that anger to finally hear what I’m trying to tell myself.

The anger of that sweat-drenched kid trying to get groceries is the same anger I feel when I finally let my body feel what’s happening around me. It’s happening to others much more, and when I feel it in myself, I can feel it more in them. Their fear of what’s coming, their worry about the future and their health and even their survival. Their frustration, and then their disappointment, and then their anger over all the broken promises of systems we didn’t want and don’t know yet how to escape.

That’s what that kid’s anger was about, a deep well connecting his own soul to the souls of others. Tap into the collective unconscious, and it’s quite a bitter draught. And what I taste there is a lot more anger from others that will soon turn to rage, and I don’t need to tell you what will probably come after that.

But actually, I do need to tell you what could come after that. Enough of us listening to our anger as a guide rather than an impulse could build worlds not shaped by opulent wealth and power. Places to live connected to other places in rational, kind, and reliable ways. The means of survival — food, housing, water, energy — created, controlled, and managed locally rather than by bloated capitalists, senseless bureaucracies, and faceless algorithms. Leaders asking not how to restrain and suppress the anger of the people, but rather how to hear what it is we’re telling them.

We could have all that. And maybe we even might.

In the meantime, I’m going to be going on some very long walks.

Want to work with me on listening to what your emotions are telling you and what your unconscious has to say? More information about my Jungian Coaching is here.