UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Anger’s in the news right now. For Americans, anger’s in the very air we breathe at present. Read articles analyzing the spectacular rise of strongman-cum-carnival barker Donald Trump to the top of the GOP primary, and you’ll encounter the word anger over. And over. Again.
Anger sometimes feels good. I’m angry because I’m right. (And if I’m right, you’re wrong.)
I’m angry because I have a right to be angry. You’ve taken my country away from me. You’re sponging off my hard work through your entitlement programs. A president with dark skin has spent the last eight years doling out lavish handouts to you dark-skinned people. I’m mad as hell and I don’t intend to take it any more.
Anger and self-righteousness go hand in hand like wood and termites. We nurse our anger — we take pride in it — because it demonstrates to us and others that we’re overflowing with righteousness. At times in which the best lack conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity, and they’re not uncommonly puffed up in those times with passionate intensity demonstrated by passionate anger, which in turn exhibits their claim to a righteousness surpassing your righteousness and mine.
Survivors of abuse at the hands of Catholic religious authority figures are angry at what has been done to them. Sympathetic people, people of good will, who follow the story of the abuse crisis in the Catholic church are also angry — at the abuse of good, innocent fellow human beings, at the betrayal of trust and by and downright cruelty of pastoral leaders, at the lies, sham, dissimulation.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.