Don’t Forget Your Anger

The tragedy in Uvalde, Texas has left me agonized and despairing and exhausted and enraged. The last is so intense and overwhelming that it is kindling for all of the others, nearly reaching a state of emotional fusion. I have been angry for years now, but there is something different about this, right?

Maybe it’s the slow rolling exhaustion of too much news, maybe it’s the pandemic plus the coup plus the looming recession plus the explosion of white supremacist violence plus the brutal misogyny targeting every pregnancy in the country — but somehow the details of the mass murder of elementary school children is just TOO FUCKING MUCH.

And I know I’m not alone. I know that many of us have hit the end of our tolerance, the tiny shred of rationality that holds us to politics, and now we’re howling with a kind of wordless, all consuming rage that feels like we should quadruple in size and get bulletproof green skin. I can feel it synthesize into something burning with a new kind of intensity in the middle of my chest, like I’m the living envelope to the birth of a star.

There are a lot of new rage stars born in the last day or so.

We have been angry before, and many of us for years. We have wanted to throw things and punch people (with votes) and do something that feels like it is changing the world enough to provide catharsis to vent all of this liquid hot magma our emotions have produced since November 8, 2016. We have lived through what feels like so much tragedy and misery and catastrophe that it seems impossible that we will ever stop being mad.

But it has never been enough. We have never held onto the anger, never had it directed and organized and pointed at a target. We have had it dissipate against the cold inaction of our elected officials and the seeming inevitability of the next tragedy and even our own exhaustion at being angry. And so it becomes background noise until it is summoned up by another horrible moment.

Yesterday was a horrible moment. And it feels like a dark coincidence that it was also an election night, where we learned who will carry party banners heading into November. Never have the stakes of our politics contrasted so closely with the mechanics of it, and it feels like a moment of transition for the anger we have pocketed and managed and tried to forget. We finally have a purpose for the rage.

We must stop the Republican Party and their corrosive presence in our national politics with everything we have, even if that does not include permission from the Democratic Party.

It is not about partisanship or inflation or winning arguments or settling scores; it is about never living through another day of news updates about a classroom full of dead children. It is about not having excuses for why we can’t prevent regular massacres but we can create overnight buffer zones around Supreme Court Justices when they inconveniently strip half of the population of basic autonomy. We need to destroy Republicans because the world they have constructed churns out nothing but rage.

I don’t want to stop being angry; I want to stop having reasons to be angry.

So this time, I am not letting go, or trying to find calm. I am not dousing the star of my own fury. I will not forget my anger.

I will let it burn.