I Am Not Angry

I am not angry. When a white police officer killed a black man over the suspected act of passing counterfeit money, I did not become angry. Rather I felt and continue to feel anger.

You are not angry. You feel anger. That distinction is important. When you are angry you are in a state of uncontrolled anger. Anger is a strong emotional feeling that propels you to take action. When you become angry you let anger control you. When you become angry you are likely to lash out with very little provocation.

There is a better, more productive way to use that feeling of anger. When Rosa Parks was told to go and stand in the back of the bus and let a white man have her seat she felt anger but she did not become angry. She did not yell or shout at the bus driver she simply said “No,” calmly and assertively. The bus driver called the police and the rest is history.

What you are and what you feel are not the same thing. Humans have the unique gift of awareness of self. There is something that is you. Call it consciousness, or awareness. It is very easy to confuse a felt sense with this core awareness.

There are many things that you are not and anger is one of them. You are not anger. You are not happiness. You are not joy. You are not your past or your future. Your are not your gut reactions. You are not what you think. You are not what you see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. The ability to differentiate what you feel from what you are is a powerful tool that enables you to take control of yourself and your environment.

When you accept that you are not angry, you will discover that you can control your anger and channel it in positive, productive ways. The alternative is to lash out, causing harm to yourself or even worse, harm to others.

The consequence of lashing out in anger is always negative. It will at best simply accomplish nothing of lasting importance. More often it will make things worse.

You are not angry. You many think that you are or even worse believe that you are. If you believe that you are then you are angry by virtue of the fact that you believe it to be so. Your belief does not make it real. It is a real and an unassailable truth but it is a truth the resides only in an imperfect concept of who you are.

Lashing out in anger will only serve to perpetuate the injustices that are causing your anger. The only way to create permanent lasting change is to understand that there are two kinds of anger. Anger that controls your behavior vs anger that you control. You can think of it as hot anger vs cold anger: being angry vs having anger; behaving in an antisocial manner vs behaving in a prosocial manner; seeing the world in terms of us and them vs recognizing that at our core we are all part of humanity and everything that is alive; being driven by your ego vs recognizing that there is you and there is your behavior and that they are separate.

You can change. That does not mean denying your anger; far from it. What you feel is real and important. Your anger is important. My anger is important. Together we can change the system. It will not happen tomorrow. Systemic change will take years or even decades. We must continue to live with and feel our anger for as long as it takes to change the system.

This will never happen if we become angry. It will never happen if we give in to the powerful emotions and urges that are being fuel by the current situation.

Between the stimulus and the response there is a space and in that space lies our humanity. — Victor Frankel

Resist lashing out in anger.

Rather let us keep alive the feeling of anger for as long as it takes to build a better future for humanity.