There’s a difference between rage and fury.
Rage is uncontrolled, often violent. It seems to overflow a person. It’s like an endless storm rolling over anything in its path, especially including the person experiencing it.
Fury is focused, tight, purposeful. It gives clarity to one’s thoughts. It’s like being in the eye of a hurricane, with more self-control than you knew you could have.
The irony is that rage, being obvious and in your face, is the more scary of the two when really, it’s just a storm and will blow itself out given time. Fury is quiet, but make no mistake, it’s those who feel fury you should fear, not those who rage.
I’m human. I feel anger too.
Not all the time, of course – I wouldn’t say I’m an angry person. When I was younger I used to get upset over small things like stubbing my toe, but as I’ve aged I’ve gotten some perspective on stuff like that. For example, I’ve finally understood and accept that I’m a bit clumsy, and these days when I stumble I just catch myself, sigh, and move on.
But I’m the kind of fellow that wakes up in the morning and sings songs as I do my morning routine. I engage in playful snark with my friends. When I listen to music in the car I dance in my seat as I drive. And the rare times I am experiencing an intimate, fulfilling moment with someone I love I feel gratitude swelling in my heart.
By nature, I am an affectionate, positive, and friendly person.
What angers me is injustice, to me or to others. And when I and others are powerless to do anything about it, it is deeply frustrating. I find myself angry with the direct perpetrators of injustice – egotistic, greedy, intolerant people.
But what upsets me more are the enablers. The people who have it within their power to put a stop to all of this, but don’t, because they are willfully ignorant.
Take this last election cycle, and the asshole who won it, America’s 45th president, Republican Dominic King. Let me preface this by reminding you that prior to King, America had a two term black President, which didn’t sit well with a lot of wonderful (I say sarcastically) Americans.
Dom King. What a fucking schmuck. Vile, base, a braggadocious moron who gets by on bluster, perhaps one of the greatest bullshit artists of all time. King was running against the Democrat candidate, an eminently qualified woman who nevertheless was deeply unpopular. Why was she unpopular? Let’s break it down: of course the GOP hated her, they hate all Democrats and use any leverage they can get; that’s politics after all. But why did so many others dislike her?
Three powerful reasons. First, she was a legacy; her husband had already been a two term president, and people were sick of dynasties. However, the real reason no one liked her is that she was an INTJ personality type, like me, and it’s hard to be a politician and connect with people if you are that cerebral and that socially clueless. Believe me, I know.
But the real real reason even a cretin like Dom King could defeat her was this: she had a vagina. And right after having a two term black president, conservatives and even some of the so-called independents were not going to have a woman president!
And so Dominic King was elected – even though in the end more people voted for her than him, because the American electoral system overvalues rural voters and punishes urban ones, he got the electoral votes he needed to win anyways. (The GOP are as good at cheating as the Democrats are at losing on principle.)
And since King’s taken office, it’s been a total shit show that makes even liberals nostalgic for some of his worst GOP predecessors.
My point is this: the American voters had it within their power to put a stop to all of this, but chose to be willfully ignorant instead. They elected the man who fed them the line of bullshit they demanded.
As upset as I was with King for being who he was, I was far more upset with the American voters who permitted this man to be elected, just because he said what they wanted to hear. It is truly they who are the problem.
So I was angrier at King’s enablers than I even was at King. While I never stopped believing in human potential, the whole situation added to the mountain of evidence forcing me to take a dim view of human reality.
But the ones that upset me most where the theoretical allies that continued to also be lazy thinkers, who avoided self-questioning and also were buying bullshit that supported their narratives.
The crystal power folks, the anti-vaxxers, the anti-GMO people, the language police, and the progressive Christians. All willing to turn off their brains to their own chosen panderers.
And when the choice not to think results in injustice and harm, as it almost always does, I feel anger. My empathy and compassion for the victims demands it.
Nevertheless, I almost always sided with the liberals – they might be equally lazy thinkers as the conservatives, but at least they tended to be nicer people who caused far less harm with their policies.
So I continued being assaulted every day with humans of all kinds failing to live up to their potential, failing to choose pursuing wisdom over comfortable ignorance, failing to embrace reality instead of their chosen fiction. And seeing humanity each time paying the price, in climate change, in elected assholes, in anti-science hysteria, in war, famine, rampant injustice.
I’ve always been emotionally sensitive, and this avoidable planetary symphony of pain was drowning me. And yet I was powerless to address it.
I never raged, but my fury at the unacceptable situation with humanity rose a little higher every day.
And then, like a wish come true, I got powers.