Do you find yourself getting angry more often than you used to? Do things that used to simply echo bitterly in your head now spill out into words or electronic impulses? Do things that never used to bother you, or that you could once easily dismiss, now make you need to say something? Yeah, me too!
For some time I thought it was simply a natural result of getting older. The image of an old man rocking all day long on the front porch of a hundred-year-old house, chastising passing children to get off his lawn comes to mind. But more and more, as I watch the news—such as it is—and read the opinions of people much younger than me, I can’t help but think there’s more to it than that. There’s an anger—not with any one thing in particular—but a level of publicly-expressed anger in general that never used to be acceptable.
Why is that? Sure, in the US you can—depending on which way you lean politically—blame either of the past two presidents. In fact, if you’re a Libertarian you can blame both!! Yet the phenomenon itself, the trend, if you will, is older than either Barrack Obama or Donald Trump, with American roots, perhaps, in the tumultuous 1960s. We, as a people, have gotten angrier and angrier since then. Odd, since we’ve gotten richer and more comfortable since then as well. Let’s set that aside for a moment.
Another argument against placing the blame on the last twelve years of US presidential leadership is the appearance of this anger being a global phenomenon. Everybody, not just Americans, seems to be angrier than they once were, and it shows in the number of minor conflicts that increasingly undercut global peace and security. One wonders if it isn’t simply the next stage of human development, the Rancorsapien, which makes me want to poll tribesmen in remote parts of Africa or New Guinea—yet their very remoteness raises an interesting possibility as well, doesn’t it?
Maybe it’s the media or, more likely, the internet itself. As a child there was no chance of me broadcasting my need for a later bedtime or absolute hatred of taking out the trash beyond the neighborhood or my classroom. Yet today, any kid can pick up his iPhone and live-stream worldwide. Has this ability changed things, somehow? Does knowing that folks you might deeply offend are too far away to punish you change your behavior, affect what you are willing to say with your “outside voice”? Maybe. Does the fact that media relies more than ever upon filling the airwaves with something—even worldwide there isn’t enough real news to fill a 24-hour news cycle, 365 days a year—mean that eventually more opinion is now broadcast than objective fact? Possibly.
But returning to the point set aside up above, shouldn’t we, as humans, have less to complain about—to be angry about—today than in years past? I can turn on virtually anything in my house from the comfort of my reclining, massaging, wifi-extending, cup-holding, remote-organizing, environmentally-friendly, low-fat, gluten-free La-Z-Boy chair. The car can now parallel-park itself. Food—of almost any description on the planet—can come to me through an extensive network of delivery services, so I don’t have to raise or kill my own grub. Gas and electricity are piped into my home so I never have to harvest wood from the nearby forest—wherever that might be! I can call family any time of night or day, and even video chat angry tirades, and never have to wait weeks for hand-written letters to arrive through the mail. And I can browse the contents of a million libraries from the comfort of my bathroom throne (sorry for the image). Life has become…easy, hasn’t it?
But I guess that’s all relative. Maybe the reason why succeeding younger generations are so angry and dissatisfied, why we all seem to be getting angrier by the year, is because we’re so disconnected from the sweat, pain, and effort required just to live in the old days. Don’t know, but its an interesting thought.
French philosopher Voltaire pushed a theory of human civilization that characterizes the rise of tough, hardy peoples to the top of any regional power structure as reflective of their harsh up-bringing. That the difficulties any people—Assyrians, Germans, Romans, Persians…pick one—faced while attaining greatness made them all but irresistible. Yet once on top, the civilization in question—Assyrians, Germans…you get the idea—inevitably enjoyed the riches they’d acquired, the luxuries they could now afford, the softer lifestyles they could never have imagined in their youth. And this indulgence led them to decline as another, tougher, hardier people took their turn climbing the ladder. He referred to the phenomenon as wearing wooden shoes going up and silk slippers coming down the civilizational ladder.
Modern historians love to throw darts at Voltaire’s simplistic depiction of human civilizational development, but perhaps there’s something to it after all. How spoiled are we, as Americans, in 2020? How good do we have it? More to the point, how good do we have it compared to our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents? My grandfather used to tell me stories of the Great Depression, of going off to work in a factory to help feed his family back on the farm. THE FARM…you know…the place where food comes from!!! How tough were times when that’s the reality? Yet even he hadn’t needed to defend that farm against marauders, hadn’t been required to clear the forest to create fields to plow…but somebody had, and THAT had been tougher still.
I think you see where I’m going with this. Maybe we all need to take a moment to consider just how lucky we are to be living in such times. For those of us who are older, its worth remembering what things were like when we were young. For you younger readers out there, especially those born after Al Gore invented the internet, you’re going to have to pick up a book (yes…<sigh>…it can be an E-book) and read about what life was like for those who came before. More to the point, you should probably get out of the house (gasp!)—better yet, leave the country for a minute—and go somewhere less developed, see people really struggling to survive…and not just struggling to make the TiVo work. Then, maybe, you’ll begin to see your own life in a different light. And perhaps be a little less angry…or at least less willing to share that anger with the world.
Just a thought…
M.G. Haynes