This morning I attended a presentation by one of the great social justice heroes of our time. Ruth Messinger, the president of the American Jewish World Service, spoke at Temple Israel of her organization's work providing humanitarian relief and development aid, in cooperation with indigenous grassroots organizations in the poorest countries in the world. A brief glimpse at the remarkable work of this organization quickly pierces the denial that usually shields us from the truly horrific facts about how many human beings in the world live in abject poverty, without adequate food, water, and shelter, much less modern sanitation, health care, and basic human rights.
One would have been hard-pressed to find in this week's press a single acknowledgment of the truly outrageous fact that many thousands of children die of preventable hunger every single day of the year. But we saw endless iterations of the story of public outrage about the awarding of large bonuses to AIG executives.
Surely, these bonuses were scandalous, if not criminal. Yet for some time, I have been wondering about the righteousness of so-called righteous anger. First, I wonder, why do we fly into collective fits of righteous anger about one issue rather than another? Why has the AIG scandal so galvanized public anger when, for example, the issue of human sex trafficking around the world scarcely makes it to the news and the long-acknowledged genocide in Darfur continues?
I have come to believe that righteous indignation is not always as righteous as it looks or feels. Our anger has many components. One is our wholesome, even holy, cry of protest against injustice. But given its selective quality, one must take a deeper look at how often we – as individuals and as a society – use our anger as a way to avoid contemplating painful situations. Anger, natural and justified as it may sometimes be, is too often an unthinking rush of emotion motivated by a need to distance ourselves from that which hurts or threatens to hurt us. We would prefer to identify a victim to blame for our pain, then rage against the supposed enemy, rather than look deeply at our pain and consider possibilities for wise response.
I daresay that sometimes the impulse that moves us to rage is a bit like the impulse to hate and to violence. I hate what is happening to me or to my people, and so I want to find a villain or an enemy and rage against him. But in the midst of rage, few of us can think clearly about what needs to be done, either to care for victims or to right the wrong that has been done. If we as a nation had taken the time this week to contemplate the depth of pain and anxiety in our country in these hard times, the newspapers and talk shows might have been less exciting, but more wisdom might have emerged to guide us forward to a time of more plenty and more wisdom.
