Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Anger's Applications

Reading comments on facebook in response to MSN's question: was the end of the war in Iraq a success? Readers are incensed, from the look of their diatribes against the administration, against the war in general, against whatever their personal feelings told them was wrong. And no doubt a lot must be wrong in any war. Murder, pure and simple. Defense? That's usually the incentive. How is killing, no matter who commits it, NOT murder?

Not to say that fury won't incite one to mayhem. Quietly believe what you want, if a loved one has been killed in any manner whatsoever, anger will overcome reason at some point. The stages of grief, anger, acceptance . . . everyone has read them, none may know them until that time of moving through comes to us.

Life ends. Life begins. Cycles of birth and death have prevailed for human beings always. It seems that at some point, we might begin to accept the process, the inevitable moving toward that first and last. Attaching any personal feelings to either of these is accepted as normal, defined usually as 'love' . . . leading toward protection, possession, even illusory imaginings of control.

A person I know, whose superior intelligence is never in question in my mind, says: anger motivates. Propels, stimulates. Perhaps we use it for these purposes . . . avoiding complacency, boredom, tedium, mediocrity . . . those dreaded states of dead-eyed living.

Quiet acceptance at this moment is possible. Flaming fury may be next, depending on what is heard, believed, feared. Is it possible that a complete absence of anger denotes an enlightened being? One who has achieved the highest state of existence within the human condition? Or has that person simply, without fight, begun to merge with destiny?

If any of us could have the choice, an immutable sentence for life, to rid ourselves of anger altogether . . . it might be most intriguing . . . our decisions thus.

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