Why and How to Get Pissed Off

What makes you angry? Are you pissed off when it takes too long for the waiter to come to your table? How about when you come home from the supermarket and realize that you forgot the one thing you really needed for your dinner? Even worse, how about when the dry cleaner loses your shirt? 

There is something now that should make you angrier than all of those.  Not angrier by a few degrees. No, angrier like your life is being threatened.  It’s that thing called, “Donald Trump.” And it better piss you off.

We have been taught that our system of government allows us to have lives that surpass the freedom and comfort offered by any other system in history. Of course, that goes a little too far. Ask the slaves. Ask the Native Americans. And so on and so on. But, recognizing that no system devised by fallible humans can be perfect, ours’ has to be recognized as pretty, pretty, pretty good (with apologies to Larry David). What makes it this way? It corrects itself. It does that by its acceptance of certain fundamental understandings. Among those is the legitimacy of its electoral process and the acceptance of its results.

Donald Trump’s mission is to undermine that process. As a result, Donald Trump is undermining what makes our country pretty, pretty, pretty good. 

If that doesn’t piss you off, what does?

No other President has ever refused to recognize the results of an election. Among all of the traditions that George Washington left us with was his walking away from power at a time when he easily could have kept it. Even the amoral scoundrel, Richard Nixon, accepted the results of the 1960 election when it was very possible that the Kennedy votes from the graveyards of Chicago could have been challenged. But Donald Trump won’t adhere to that tradition. No, his monstrous narcissism won’t allow it. He’d rather manufacture votes. If he had been clever enough to exhume some cemetery votes, he certainly would have. But he is so transparently simple that all he could think of was to plead with vote counters to lie, and when that failed, to inspire an insurrection. 

If that doesn’t piss you off, what does?

As central to all of this as Donald Trump is, he is not alone. He has his acolytes. These monsters ask us to believe that Trump’s victory was the reality. This claim has the same veracity as when the television producers of “The Bachelor” tell us to accept that as a “reality” show. The “Big Lie” is forcing the country to split apart. The miserable perpetrators of that lie are despicable – more despicable even than those who forced the country to split apart over slavery.  At least the slave supporters believed in their cause, as atrocious as their cause was. The Trump supporters believe only in themselves – in their ability to raise money from the dunderheads who believe their lies, and thereby to increase their own power. 

If that doesn’t piss you off, what does?

Some very smart people are saying out loud that we are inching closer and closer to civil war. At any other time since 1865, that would have been a laughable proposition. Tragically, it is laughable no longer. That is not to say that it is accurate. There is a chasm between laughable and accurate. But civil war in this country should never find its way into that chasm. It is terrifying that it now has. 

If that doesn’t piss you off, what does?

So, what do we do about it? Obviously, we get angry – very angry.  What do we do with that anger? It is tempting to use it emotionally and mount attacks on the Trumpers that could easily end in violence.  But that is precisely what the Trumpers want. In his book, “Not Born Yesterday,” Hugo Mercier, a French cognitive scientist, astutely makes the point that it’s not believing in absurdities that makes people commit atrocities. It’s wanting to commit atrocities that make people believe in absurdities. 

If that doesn’t piss you off, what does?

No, our anger needs to be channeled into precisely the traditions of this country that the Trumpers want to destroy. Get active. Write and talk to anyone who you think may be open to reason. Ignore the unfortunate cliché that you should never talk about religion or politics. There is nothing today more important to talk about. You will never reach the hard core, but there is a soft core. They might be persuadable. At least we have to try.

There are those on our side who will just sit back and do nothing and let this budding revolution flow over them until it is too late. 

And if that doesn’t piss you off, well, what does?