American Rage
By
Leonard Zwelling
My dictionary has the difference between anger and rage as violence being intrinsic to rage. There is a continuum between anger and rage with some sort of aggressive action being a part of the latter.
In an angry country such as ours right now, and for that matter for the past ten years or so, that anger always threatens to spill into rage. Of course, the incidents of road rage are barely news any more. Rage was surely a part of January 6, 2021 and is part of the recurrent stories of school shootings, now even including a female assailant. Then there was the latest blood bath in New Orleans and the Cybertruck explosion in front of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas.
Is there any way to decrease the anger from becoming rage?
The obvious answer is to decrease the anger to start with. Given the current line-up in Washington, DC, that seems unlikely. I don’t mean because there is a major Republican majority in the city. It is that that majority is by the narrowest of margins and both sides are too angry to listen to each other. That will mean to get anything at all accomplished, there has got to be some cooperation between the members of the two parties in Congress regardless of what President Trump proposes. That in turn means a return to a level of civility not seen on Capitol Hill in years. Yet, that is the key. How can that happen?
First, the Democratic leadership has to convince the extreme progressive wing of its party that the agenda that wing proposes is one that is simply not supported by the majority of Americans, particularly those outside of New York and California. While the Squad has a following, it is very small and cannot be allowed to sink the party’s contribution to governance. If Hakeem Jeffries and the few leaders under seventy can make that clear to the caucus, that would be a good start.
On the Republican side, we were all treated to its dysfunction in barely being able to re-elect their own Speaker of the House because a few stubborn members of the Freedom Caucus would not do the right thing and get business started. Mr. Trump needs to make it clear to these people, all of whom are mega MAGA followers, that his agenda rests on their cooperation.
Personally, as a grandfather, I have seen anger turn into violence in children. It is common for kids not to get their way. They have to be taught that the solution to their frustration is not striking out at the source of their frustration (their parents) or another child.
This same scenario seems to be transpiring on Capitol Hill and, I fear, it may also be fanned by the President-elect himself. The real test of whether anger subsides or progresses to rage will be whether or not Mr. Trump can govern successfully. That will depend on his appointees running huge bureaucracies to advance his agenda without inciting his followers to violence.
Despite people who do not believe that January 6 was an example of rage, it actually was. Peaceful protest would have been fine. Storming the Capitol Building, breaking windows, chasing Congressmen, and threatening to hang the Vice President are all examples of the spill over into rage that was January 6. Trump showed no leadership that day. Now that he himself has been the victim of rage in Butler, Pennsylvania, perhaps he can lead the country off the rage precipice and into an oasis of calm. Let’s see.
