Not Mad about all the Anger

I don’t have the anger which seems to be rampant in the world. Maybe I am not paying close enough attention. Maybe I am not smart enough to recognize so many different forces in the world wish to squash me like a bug. Maybe I am just too tired to work into the frenzy of Howard Beale’s “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” mentality which seems to be typical of many, if not most, media figures today. If Paddy Chayefsky were alive he could sue all sorts of people for copyright infringement. (If you haven’t seen the movie Network I highly recommend it.) That doesn’t mean I think life is all rainbows and unicorns. How about this for a catch phrase? I’m mildly miffed and would really prefer if many things were different.

I am not a social scientist with years of experience studying the human condition so my ideas are nothing but my ideas, but I think one of the reasons so many people are ticked off is there are fewer and fewer times people who do the right thing get rewarded. Here is a tiny example of what I mean.

Every day at the school where I work students are dropped off by their parents. We have a system in place to make this safe and somewhat efficient. The cars are supposed to pull up to the curb in front of the building all going the same direction and as the front few cars release their kids they move on and the next few cars move up and do the same. Those are the people doing the right thing who should get rewarded with being able to move on smoothly with their lives. Not so much. Not when the person who doesn’t feel the need to do the polite, thinking about the concerns of others sort of thing comes swinging into the picture. This person, driving a vehicle larger than many two bedroom homes, pulls up and double parks at the front of the line. He has now blocked the car flow like the biggest blob of cholesterol in Henry Heartattack’s thoracic cavity and like the arterial plaque he is, he doesn’t care a fig for the stress put on the body as a whole. This yutz gets to go on with his “do as I please” day while the “do the right thing” guy at the end of the line reaches for his blood pressure medicine.

I realize there was public uproar when communities added fluoride to the water supply and I am not a big advocate for a “nanny” state which has the government taking care of us when we can’t do it for ourselves. (They have already reached into the snack machine at work and required granola bars take the place of a certain percentage of real snacks – mini-doughnuts and chocolate covered anythings.) That being said, I would be in favor of certain mood altering chemicals being introduced into different environments.

The main thing which would help us is if television news organizations of every stripe had a very low concentration of valium pumped in to help them bring it down a couple of notches. I mean do we really need well-dressed men and woman reading off teleprompters such fear-mongering copy as “Your very own cat may be trying to kill you in your sleep. Tune in tonight at ten.” Not to mention those proselytizing hosts of shows making it appear that we are on the path to some sort of Caligula-esque debacle of debauchery if the guys who do not believe what we believe get to be in charge of anything, and I do mean anything, even the panel of judges on Dancing with the Stars.

Truly, I think one of the first things which can get rid of the aforementioned ubiquitous anger is just looking around and realizing people are not out to get us. Whatever happened to thinking the other guy was simply wrong in his political views, not a fascist megalomaniac bent on turning the United States of America into a post-apocalyptic wasteland where there is government run healthcare, privatized Social Security and all kittens are outlawed. I would prefer the political arguments from the people sent to the various seats of government were simply between opponents with different paths to the same end (the betterment of the lives of their constituents) not enemies locked in a mortal struggle for the soul of the nation. I want Adlai Stevenson versus Dwight Eisenhower not He-Man versus Skeletor.

Christopher Pyle advocates for calmness and if you don’t agree he hopes your cat kills you in your sleep. He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.