Anger is a Good Thing

_{Photo by Gabriel Matula on Unsplash}

Don't get upset, get angry.

Funnily enough this is one of the things that has been on my mind a lot lately, right up there with 'be more proactive'. Weird, I know, and I hear you ask why?
Well, because they're essentially the same thing, at least in my view of the world. That is to say, I mean the same thing when I say either and I find that the former is a much, much better way of putting it. I keep getting upset by various things and my first instinct, as with so many things these days, is to share it on Steem, which would basically mean make a post complaining about the given situation. But that's not going to help, is it? You get out all the upset and you point out how very irksome and unfair the situation is – and then what? You might be calmer, but the situation remains the same. You are exactly where you were 20 minutes ago, when you started writing, only worse.
Because now, you've wasted all the energy you had on complaining about it, rather than changing it. A lot of things don't come easy, it's true and it might seem far more appealing at times to bitch about it. But the truth is that if you don't change things, nobody will. It has to come from within you. Because what if you're the only one bothered by it? Sometimes, that's the case, sometimes, it's not. But even if it's not, you can't just sit on your ass and expect someone else to solve it for you. What if nobody will?

Sir Terry Pratchett had some excellent words to say about this:

“The phrase 'Someone ought to do something' was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider 'and that someone is me'.”

It's true, we don't. We're content with complaining and waiting around for someone else to step in. But we don't have to wait. We could be proactive. Or angry.
That's another Pratchett quote, by the way.

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It's a motif in many of his works, there's a terrible underlying anger in the Discworld series. I remember listening to Neil Gaiman's eulogy, after Sir Terry died and something that struck me was that he pointed out how very angry Terry Pratchett was, how that feeling drove him. Hell, even Terry himself told him ~

Do not underestimate this anger. This anger was the engine that powered Good Omens.

And this got me to thinking. About Terry Pratchett, about the genius he was and how constructively he used his anger. And about anger and I slowly realized that maybe anger isn't the bad feeling we paint it out to be. Sure, maybe it's not the nicest of feelings, But this is not the nicest of worlds, you know?

In this bland culture of ours, we try to reduce conflict and avoid unhappy thoughts, but those fuckers are everywhere. I agree, maybe you should cut out negativity from your life and focus on loving rather than hating. But not all things in this world are worth loving. In fact, if you look about you, you'll find there's a great deal of things to get angry about. Like the lies you're told, like children being taken away from their parents, like teachers telling your kid they'll never be good enough, like bombs that fall on families who'd much rather be spending a nice afternoon together, like people dying slowly before your eyes. It's so fucking unfair. And that's not something you can love or feel good about.
And you have a choice, you either avoid it, wrap yourself in bubblewrap and try to keep away from the sharp edges in life, or you can get angry. You can fight back and you can use that feeling of anger to power you.
There's little point in writing a post about how unfair it is that people die way too early. You can complain, but that won't help. And you can try to repress that anger, to push it down and try to drown it.
But that won't help. It would just be a waste. Anger is energy and whoever said nothing good comes out of anger didn't know what they were talking about. Or maybe they did, maybe they understood its power and wanted to keep you from discovering it.

Bad things are not going to go away simply because you don't like them. People will still die, wars will rage on, children will be abused. They will still exist and as long as they exist, you can either ignore them or get angry about them (which is a perfectly natural response). Get angry about what's being taken from you and let it push you to fight for it. Because while you're on your happy cloud, they'll take everything from you.

Thank you for reading,