“Fear is the Root of Anger” Feb. 11, 2024 Dr. Roger Ray
Many years ago I heard the famous author and psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, say in a lecture that if you need therapy but you can’t afford it, pretend that you are an alcoholic and go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It is actually pretty good advice. AA literature is the best distillation of psychological insight and treatment that you are going to find anywhere. It isn’t perfect and clinicians often argue with their methods and conclusions but, there is a lot of wisdom collected through their decades of experience in their literature.
One of my favorite passages in AA’s “Big Book”, is found on page 66 where it says: If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.
I love that phrase that calls anger a “dubious luxury.” There are things to be angry about . . . injustice, racism, poverty, hunger, war, and the media’s obsession with Taylor Swift but as a product of the patriarchal south, I can tell you that anger was sharpened into being the only emotion allowed to men in almost any situation. We were not supposed to cry, we couldn’t be too sad, too depressed, too worried, or scared, but we proved our masculinity by being angry.
I can remember it as if it was just yesterday, nearly 40 years ago my father and I took a trip to visit my uncle, my father’s eldest brother, who was near death. Presley was a kind old bachelor who lived in a little house on a lake near Chicago where he kept an immaculate house and well-tended flower and vegetable gardens.
But this visit was marked by chaos. Presley was wasting away from all of the side effects of diabetes. His clothes hung on his withered body, he was unshaven, and his hair and fingernails were too long. My father saw what I saw, and he became very angry. He was made at the cleaning lady who had not polished the silver or properly cleared the house of cobwebs. He was mad at the neighbor’s son who was sloppy in his job of mowing the lawn and weeding the gardens. He was mad at the visiting nurse because, well, because Presley was obviously dying, and she hadn’t stopped it.
What I saw in my father was fear . . . fear of mortality . . . fear of losing his father figure . . . fear that he couldn’t do anything about it. What I saw was that the nurse, the cleaning lady, and even the teenaged neighbor had all realized that Presley was a lonely old man who was near death and so, when they came to his house, they spent time sitting in the lawn chairs just talking to him. They listened to his stories about his years on a farm in Kentucky, about his decades of work in the steel industry, about his late wife, his vineyard, his church, his friends. Because it was time to let the silver tarnish and the weeds to have their way with the gardens. It was time to just show a dying man some love.
When Presley died, his minister came to talk to dad and me, the way that ministers do when an old church member dies . . . he had only known Presley as a sick old man who was rarely able to attend church and so he asked us to tell him about Presley. My dad stuttered and shook and just said that he didn’t know what to say. His mind was so clouded by fear and anger, he couldn’t even describe his favorite person in the world. Presley was the only one of nine children who never had children and so he lavished patriarchal attention on his nieces and nephews. I told the minister a lot . . . that in my childhood, if I got to eat in a restaurant, it was because Uncle Presley was buying. If I got a nice present on Christmas, it was because he sent it. He noticed potential in me that no one else did, and he sent me a subscription to National Geographic so that we could talk on the phone about the places it described.
We exchanged photos of the birds at our feeders and talked about the migratory patterns of songbirds. He took me to science museums, the Chicago Adler Planetarium. My father undoubtably had many more profound memories that he simply couldn’t articulate because, well, to say it plainly, anger made him stupid.
Anger is a dubious luxury. I’m angry about the repeal of the Roe v Wade protection of women’s reproductive rights. I’m angry about the thousands of immigrant children who were kept in cages to punish their parents for daring to flee violence and hunger to give their children a better life. And, paradoxically, I’m angry about Israel’s history of oppression of Palestinians, and I’m even more angry about the terrorist attacks against Israelis by Hamas, Hezbollah, and whoever Iran is arming now.
But I don’t want to waste anger on the drivers at the intersection who get so lost in their cell phones that they forget to drive when the light turns green. I don’t want to waste the energy of being angry at the server who gets so caught up in a conversation in the kitchen that they forget to ever come back to the table and actually provide service. I don’t want to be angry about having to wait in line at the pharmacy, at the department of motor vehicles, or at McDonalds when someone ahead of me is staring at the menu board as if they have never heard of a hamburger before.
This topic came to mind lately as the media gave nearly constant coverage to the caucus in Iowa and the primary in New Hampshire. Over and over again, interviewers asked voters who they were going to vote for or who they voted for and, as you know, most of them favored Donald Trump, who they said, “had been a good president.”
They obviously weren’t interviewing people who were on their way out of the monthly MENSA Club meeting, but they looked normal enough, the kind of people you see in the grocery store or in line at the DMV but they were just casually referencing Donald Trump as having been a good president and, I’m entirely sincere here, I have no idea what they are talking about.
And I’ll tell you, after moving to Florida, I found a nearby coffee shop where I liked to sit and study but the owner kept coming over to my table and asked me what I was working on. This past week, when I told her that I was working on a sermon about grievance and MAGA voters, she and her sister came unglued in stereo.
They both insisted that they were not Trump supporters because they were angry about anything but rather it was because Joe Biden is so evil. They insisted that he is giving the country away to China, with no examples given, and that he had turned America into a socialist country, again, with no examples of encroaching socialism . . . Biden is old but public schools, police and fire departments, the army, air force, and navy, all socialist institutions, were not his idea.
It is true that Biden is old and it is true that he isn’t the smartest man ever to occupy the oval office. He is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he may not even be the sharpest spoon in the drawer. He graduated near the bottom of his law school class but he did graduate on his own, rather than having his sister write all of his papers for him which is how Trump got through college. He isn’t an Einstein or even a Kennedy or an Obama, but you just can’t say that he is evil. He is a nice old man who has a big heart who probably shouldn’t have ever run for president but this is how our nominating system works . . . or, more accurately, doesn’t work. Still, as one friend recently said to me, Biden would be a better president as a cadaver than Trump would ever be and that, in my estimation, is not hyperbole. It is a fact.
But let me not go on an MSNBC style rant, what do the people who worked closely with Trump say about him, the Republicans who worked in his administration:
General John Kelly, the former director of Homeland Security, was hand picked by Trump to serve as his chief of staff to bring stability to the White House and the Trump administration but he left in 2020 saying: “The depths of his dishonesty is just astounding to me. The dishonesty, the transactional nature of every relationship, though its more pathetic than anything else. He is the most flawed person I have ever med in my life.”
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/16/politics/donald-trump-criticism-from-former-administration-officials/index.html
His Attorney general, Bill Barr, after defending him against all comers for years, finally broke ranks with him over the theft of nuclear secrets and other classified documents:
Barr also said Trump is a “fundamentally flawed person who engaged in reckless conduct.”
“He had no right to those documents,” Barr said. “The government tried for over a year quietly and with respect to get them back, which was essential that they do, and he jerked him around.”
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/06/19/ex-trump-officials-among-loudest-critics-in-documents-case
His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, said: “(Trump’s) understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of US history was really limited. It’s really hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even understand the concept for why we’re talking about this.” Of course, after a private conversation trying to explain NATO to Trump, Tillerson famously left the oval office muttering that Trump was a “fXXXing moron.”
Mark Esper, the former Secretary of Defense said: “I think he’s unfit for office. … He puts himself before country. His actions are all about him and not about the country. And then, of course, I believe he has integrity and character issues as well.”
In a recent article, CNN lists 24 former administration members, from the former vice president to a 20 something-aid to the chief of staff, who have said that Trump is unfit to hold office again.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/03/politics/donald-trump-former-allies-what-matters/index.html
This is not a matter of partisan politics. These are just obvious and indisputable facts, without even going into the personal stuff about his public statements about wishing that he could date his daughter, the dozens of women who have accused him of sexual assault, his recent trial that involved both rape and defamation of character, and the more than 90 indictments against him for voter fraud, tax cheating schemes, and insurrection against the United States…. Of of which my former friend at the coffee shop says, are fake allegations . . . even the ones where we have video and audio tapes of the crimes as they took place.
I think that the Georgia journalist, Jay Bookman put my feelings into words when he said: For me personally, the most painful aspect of his rise has been the damage it has caused to my faith in my fellow Americans. I do not understand how a person can watch what he says and does and still believe he belongs in the Oval Office.
This is the issue, isn’t it? What is the attraction of Donald Trump that has a sweet little old lady leaving a New Hampshire polling place saying, “I don’t like how he runs his mouth but I think he is a good president”?
Like Cornell West, the Union Seminary Professor, who said on Bill Maher’s show in 2020, “How can, in a country of more than 300 million people, we end up with Joe Biden and Donald Trump as our candidates for president?” And now, he is so disgusted with the fact that we are going to end up with the same choice in 2024 that West is running for president himself, but he has a point. These are two horrible candidates, its just that one is so much more horrible than the other one.
Seriously, if we were given a choice between Trump and Charles Manson, I’m afraid that I would still have to vote for Charles Manson . . . at least he has been dead for 7 years and isn’t able to do much more harm; Trump is dangerous to democracy, to the global economy, and he is a friend to every dictator and tyrant in the world. And yet, about half of American voters are poised to vote for him again.
What, we all wonder, is the draw? It is too easy to say that MAGA America is a cult. Even a cult has to give you something to draw followers. All I can see that Trump gives to my older brother, to the lady at the coffee shop, and the disgruntled voters of America is a validation of their anger.
But anger is exhausting. I don’t think that anger is the real root of people’s attraction to Trump, I think it is what lies behind anger, which is fear. White people who are afraid of losing privilege. Evangelicals who are afraid of losing control of society and social norms. I think that it is men who fearful of female autonomy. I think it is poor people who are afraid of losing their chance of becoming rich. I think it is low wage employees who are afraid that illegal immigrants might take their jobs at even lower wages.
I have heard Bill Maher say several times that we can hate Donald Trump but we can’t hate all Trump voters but, I will confess that I don’t always feel that way. I hate racism. I hate misogyny. I hate xenophobia. I hate homophobia. I hate classism. And, in effect, isn’t that the same thing as hating Trump voters?
But maybe, just maybe, if we can not react to them as simply being racist, white privileged, angry white fascists and see them as being more pitiable frightened people who need to be made to feel safe in their own homes, who need to be reassured they are not being replaced by poor immigrants, Jews, or college educated people . . . they’re just being replaced by AI and robots . . . because, even if self driving taxis sometimes have accidents, you at least don’t have to listen to their racist screeds while being driven to the airport.
In the end, I just want to say what I have said to you before through the years. Let go of your racism. Set aside your need for privilege. Embrace immigrants, and people of other gender identities, and religions as your equals and the best way to do that is to simply stop being afraid.
