There was an article in the IDEAS section of Sunday's Boston Globe ( May 5, 2019) this week about anger addiction. The writer described one man’s personality
change as he was increasingly engaged in listening to
radio programs of the Rush Limbaugh genre. Frank Senko went from being a loveable,
genial, ”hippie before there were hippies” type guy to being “irritable, cranky
and irascible” - engaging in the habit of spending three hour “lunches” with
Rush Limbaugh. His daughter shared: A man who’d made his children read for an
hour before bedtime, who always told them that higher education was the most
worthwhile thing they could do, became suspicious of universities as liberal
incubators. A man who used to stop people on the street when he heard an accent
he didn’t recognize to say hello now didn’t like immigrants or Hispanic people.
A man who’d welcomed his children’s gay friends into his home “didn’t want it
in his face” anymore.
For
some time now -at least since the 2016 election, I have been monitoring my own
responses to the level of anger I hear on the news, regardless of the
station. Irritability, adrenalin, and
fatigue all seem to be the way my body responds to the ongoing expressions of
anger and outrage that are a consistent part of our daily lives if we are regularly part of “the listening public.”
Regardless
of the source of the insult - Limbaugh or the White House or the commentary and
spin - - indulging in anger seems infectious -perhaps even an addicted response
that can change our personalities and our outlook on life.
“He
became a person we hated being around and we didn’t know. It was like that
movie [Invasion of the Body Snatchers]: ‘What happened to Dad?’” said Frank
Senko’s daughter. “It was a really horrible period of time for us
. . . It was a nightmare, both my brothers blocked him, I blocked
him.” Senko’s stomach clenched every time she thought of visiting. Her dad was
angry all the time. And Senko knew exactly what was to blame: The steady
drip-feed of outrage he listened to every day.
As I listen to the folks I encounter in
the course of a week, I hear the stress, the irritability, the impatience. I see the aggression and rudeness that come
with anger in everyday social interactions, in the way people drive, in the
insensitivity to and impatience with the needs of others.
Anger’s ubiquity, its stickiness, indicates that we get
something out of it. Frank Senko’s anger had become a habitual response to
perceived threats and cues, a repeated behavior for a specific reward that led
him to abandon the values he’d taught his own children and isolate himself to
simmer in the vitriol coming over the airwaves. Senko had another way to
describe her dad’s behavior: “He was addicted.”
So -I am pondering the question of the right place of anger
as a legitimate human emotion. I feel as
though it has become distorted and abused in some way. Ephesians 4: 25-27 reads this way (NRSV): So then, putting away falsehood, let us
speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry
but do not sin; do not let the sun set on your anger and do not make room for
the devil.
Many years ago, I was taught that anger is an appropriate
and healthy response to injustice, that it is energy that can be used to create
change where change is needed. Anger arising out of compassion and empathy may
be the fuel that is necessary to engage in truth telling - the energy
required to encounter falsehood. There are many things about which anger is the emotion we feel in order to energize ourselves to act in the service
of justice.

So what is the difference between the “Limbaugh” anger that
seems to catch so many people in its addictive net and the kind of anger that becomes the energy for creative change?
I wonder if part of the difference is that
the kind of rage response that seems to hold so many people in its grip these
days is one that only empowers and feeds on itself to permit an individual to
feel larger, somehow - - more powerful- - simply by virtue of the effect that
their rage has on other people around them. It is destructive anger which
accomplishes little more than its own self perpetuation.
On the other hand, the anger of which
Ephesians speaks is one that is directed toward rectifying wrongs and restoring
relationships -an anger that does not permit falsehood but rather desires
truth.
The anger in Ephesians is to be
limited - not to survive the setting sun - and is not to be the source of
discord and separation (making room for the “devil”) but rather the instrument
of
building up a whole community in
truth and love.
Frank Senko’s story had a happy ending to what his daughter
described as his anger addiction: But
there is hope. You can quit anger. Senko’s dad did, before his death at the age
of 93 in 2016 — with a little help. After his radio broke, he stopped listening
to the talk shows; he and Senko’s mother started eating lunch together again. He
stopped watching Fox News when they got a new TV and his wife programmed the
remote with all her channels. And while he spent a week in the hospital
recovering from kidney stones, his family quietly unsubscribed him from the
right-wing emails he’d been getting.
“He
became happy. And adorable. And we became friends again. And he and my mother
got along really great,” said Senko. “The last couple years of his life, he was
himself again, and we had him back.”
Unlimited and unthinking exposure to the
destructive, sensationalist anger that emanates from the Rush Limbaugh and Fox
News types of media is not good for us - pure and simple. It affects our personalities and our
responses to life around us. Better,
perhaps, to take control of the dial or the remote and fill our senses with
reasoned consideration of the issues that come in moderated voice tones that do
not activate the adrenalin and the rage response but rather may generate in us
the response to act with compassionate anger in behalf of sanity and justice, truth telling and reconciliation. From time to time we may need to ask
ourselves “What the heck am I listening
to? And why?”
Vicky Hanjian
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