Lots of folks are angry these days. At least they talk angry, especially on religion and politics. For most folks, religion and politics are so mixed together that you can't talk about one without talking about the other. If you don't believe me, just bring up abortion or the death penalty. To the very next person you see.

 

Liberals want to leave religion out of the abortion debate; they see it as a personal choice issue and that's the end of it. They hardly ever want to leave religion out of the death penalty debate. Bring up the death penalty to a bunch of liberals and you'd think they all just got out of seminary.

 

Conservatives are just the opposite. You might not think this is so when it comes to the death penalty, since even an atheist conservative will start quoting the Old Testament at the mere mention of the death penalty. But ask them where in the Bible does it say there needs to be a death penalty, and see what they say.

 

Once I saw an angry liberal on TV. I mean, it's not unusual to see angry liberals on TV, but this one was on a talk show and he got to talk. A lot. He talked about foreign policy and the environment and he was totally pissed. I don't know if the other guy on the talk show agreed with him (though he probably did), but I think the host guy would just as soon have changed the subject. Not a lot of laughs in ozone holes. Anyway, the angry liberal guy said at the end that people need to educate themselves on the issues, I guess so that they can be just as pissed as he was.

 

But I think if you really do educate yourself on any issue, you're going to learn about both sides of it and not be so pissed off.

 

I don't think politics themselves makes folks angry though. If they did, folks in Washington would be beating the crap out of each other all the time. I think most folks are angry because they're not rich and famous and successful and having sex all the time, and someone comes along and tells them that it's because of the liberals or the conservatives or this minority group or whatever. And they believe it, and they vote for the person who told them that. And that person goes on to Washington and becomes rich and famous and successful and has sex all the time.

 

These days, politicians have to come across as reasonable and level-headed. That's why even with all the hubub about September 11, you haven't seen George W. crying and banging his fist on the table. You can be pasionate, but not angry. It wasn't always this way: Did you ever see those old newsreels of Hitler giving his speeches? I don't speak German, but he seemed pissed to me. He was pissed all the time. I mean, he failed at everything he ever did, his country was in ruins, he was in and out of jail, and I even read once that for most of his adult life he was impotent. I don't want to know how anyone came by that information, but it does seem like the kind of thing we all want to believe. We don't want to believe that he was good at math or kind to his dog (note: I did hear that he was kind to his dog, which kind of makes me feel sorry for the dog, because he or she might have been a really great dog and one day he or she might get to doggy heaven and all the other dogs are going to know that he or she was Hitler's dog)......what we want to believe is that he was an impotent syphillitic with one testicle whose mom made him wear a dress til he was 10.

 

Anyway, Hitler you could say was truly angry. Down to his bones. I mean, all these touchy-feely hippys these days talk about "owning your feelings", but damn.

 

Hitler is like the absolute worst case scenario for every pop psychology self-improvement freak you ever heard of. It doesn't matter how many captains of industry or astronauts or movie stars or great scientists or inventors they talk about, you can always use Hitler to counter them:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's another little history lesson:

 

Did you ever wonder why, at the start of the Civil War, all these states that were seceding one right after another already had armies ready to fight? When Lincoln was calling for volunteers up North and McClellan was just starting to train the Army of the Potomac, all these little states already had armies? I'll tell you why. It was because of one really angry little man named John Brown.

 

See, back in those days all the alarmists and fanatics in the South were trying to rile people up by telling them that these fire-breathing Yankees were going to come down here and start a big bloody slave rebellion. Most folks didn't take it seriously, I reckon anymore than they did a few years back when everyone was talking about the Y2K bug. They didn't take it seriously, I mean, until John Brown actually tried to do it.

 

John Brown was just pissed off. He wanted to free the slaves now, dammit, and he didn't care how he did it or what happened after. He was just a wild-eyed country preacher waving his arms around and telling you that hell ain't more than a half-mile off. And he had the guns to prove it.

 

So John Brown went up to Harper's Ferry and started handing out guns. And if you weren't with him he shot you no matter what color you were. Now if John Brown had stayed home, maybe a bunch of the Southern boys would have stayed home too and not rushed out and joined these state militias, and maybe the war would have been over a lot quicker.

 

 

Not that the South didn't have it's share of really angry people. Like Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was everything bad that folks have ever said about the South: ignorant, uneducated, inbred backwoods hayseed that made his fortune selling slaves.

 

He hated everybody. He hated the aristocrats who pretty much ran things in the South back in those days. He hated Yankees. He even hated his own slaves, which to me seems really stupid: If you really believe that you are superior to someone, and you own them and they have to do what you say, and you have the full weight of the law behind you, what could you possibly have to be upset about? But he was. And he never let go of it, either: When Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, Forrest was one of them that wanted to go into the hills and fight a guerrilla war, even if it took a generation or two.

 

You might just think he was an all-around jerk, and you'd probably be right. By all accounts, you'd meet the guy and  walk away wondering how the sperm cell that formed him ever beat out a million other sperm cells to fertilize the egg. You might even wonder why it is that we even remember Nathan Bedford Forrest, and I might too, except for two things:

 

So you might wonder why I'm giving all these bad examples of angry people, but I can't think of any good examples. John McEnroe? Sam Kinison?

 

Scientists generally aren't angry. Who are they going to be angry at? Damn you, electron son of a bitch!

 

I can think of people in history who could have been angry, but weren't, like Gandhi or MLK or the Apostle Paul. Paul would be eating rats in prison with a fat guy sitting on his head, and writing letters to Timothy saying "I'm writing this to encourage you..." Not that these guys didn't get angry, just that they didn't stay angry.

 

(Note to Bible purists: Ok, I made that up about the fat guy)

 

Ok, class dismissed.