Lets Talk About Righteous Anger

The difference between anger that is born of profound love, and anger that emerges out of unchecked hate.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

“Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit. It is blind and nondiscriminating. True, it begins by exercising specific discrimination. This it does by centering upon the persons responsible for the situations which create the reaction of resentment, bitterness, and hatred. But once hatred is released, it cannot be confined to the offenders alone. It is difficult for hatred to be informed as to objects when it gets under way.”
― Dr. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

Sometimes I hear people say “Don’t you just hate ….” and then insert whatever politician or supreme court justice or racist, sexist, homophobic personality that is spewing awful stuff all over Tic Toc, Facebook, or cable news that particular day.

I believe in the enduring power of love and its because of this its been important to consider different types of anger. There is anger that is born out of love, and anger born out of fear or hate. We are living in a time when fear and division are being encouraged and anger/ grievance exploited. Certain kinds of media seem to be intentionally selling us fear and encouraging rage on an hourly news cycle. So I’m just going to go ahead and talk about love…but also talk about anger.

Anger is the natural human response to injustice, unfairness, threat and deliberate meanness - and sometimes this kind of righteous anger has been a catalyst and propelled me to bolder action.

But this is anger born not of hate, but of my profound love…love for justice, love for kindness, truth and decency, love for all my kindred (human, animal and plant), love of our embattled natural world, love for my community and daughter and family and friends and dogs and birds and art and poetry and all things great and small that give this life meaning and goodness and beauty.

And it is true, I do get righteously angry. I get angry when human and civil rights are ignored or trampled upon. I get angry about ALL the systemic “isms” that are still powerfully present in our society and express daily in people’s lives. I get angry that climate change is accelerating to critical levels and we are not putting the breaks on fossil fuel fast enough. I get angry when books are banned and real history untaught. I get angry when hard won women’s rights, voting rights, and LGBTQ+ rights are rolled back in state legislatures across the country. I get righteously angry when the politicians espousing “family values” end the child tax credit program that lifted families out of poverty and decide to end summer children’s hunger programs. So what is a person to do with justified righteous anger? How do we help one another navigate this human experience and return to the expansive power of love to guide our response?