Posted on 07/05/2002 5:15:27 AM PDT by Clive
I ONCE drove a car with a flat tyre for several kilometres. Admittedly the road was rough, so I wouldn’t have noticed a bit of extra bumping, but when I did stop, the flat tyre had been destroyed.
Why didn’t I notice I was having a most unusually rough ride? Was I drunk? No. But I was angry and that can be even worse.
I had good reason to be angry. A poor old woman had asked me to drive her disabled and orphaned grandson, whom she could no longer care for, to stay with her brother. He was the one member of the family who had a well-paid job and a big house.
He refused to take the boy in. If the boy had been strong enough to hit his uncle, I might have cheered him on, but he couldn’t even stand on his mis-shapen legs, let alone hit anyone.
That was just as well; because we went away quietly, and eventually another relative agreed to take the boy in. Some readers will agree that I was right to be that angry after witnessing such injustice and cruelty.
But I was not right to drive a car while angry. Anger can make us worse drivers than drink ever does. We lose our judgment. We lose our co-ordination.
Now I could write an appeal for the police to find a way of testing drivers for adrenalin rather than alcohol in their blood, but I won’t.
Adrenalin is the stuff that flows in our blood, to gear us up for action, when we are angry. The trouble is that the action is often inappropriate, badly judged and badly aimed.
A good boxer knows that, however big and strong his opponent is, if he can make the man angry he is well on the way to beating him up, as long as he himself keeps a cool head.
We all might have heard the story of the man who had a bad day at work, and came home angry and hit the wrong target – his wife. She went out and also hit the wrong target – their child. The child kicked the dog. The dog bit the cat and the cat jumped up onto the table and knocked the man’s dinner on to the floor.
Soon everyone was even angrier and aiming their anger at the wrong target. We all need to remember that story because we are moving into a situation where we are all likely to be angrier than we ever get in normal times.
People are hungry. More people will be hungry in the near future. Experts say that half of us will be very hungry.
That is bad in itself, but what makes it worse is that a hungry man or woman is an angry man or woman (and an angry woman can be really frightening).
Then if someone starts telling us stories, any kind of stories, about who is to blame when we can’t get bread or upfu (maize-meal), our anger could weaken our judgement.
In normal times, we would ask whether the stories were likely to be true.
If we are hungry and, therefore, angry, we are more likely to accept these stories. Our judgment is impaired by our anger and by all that adrenalin rushing through our blood.
Someone tells us that Nhingi (What’s-his-name) is hoarding food, waiting for a chance to put the price up.
Because we are angry, we are looking for someone to hit, so we will be much more ready to do something crazy like rushing out to burn down Nhingi’s store. That is not a very intelligent thing to do.
Even if he is hoarding maize in his store, burning down the store will only destroy the maize, and that leaves us all worse off.
In Zimbabwe today, and especially if we heard the story about Nhingi hoarding our precious food on the radio, that probably only means that someone wants us to go and burn down his store. Maybe he doesn’t carry the right party card.
That is bad enough. But if we get so angry that we also burn down the store belonging to someone important in their party, then we will find ourselves facing the wrath of the riot police.
Do you remember the food riots a couple of years ago? Mobs from Mbare rushed into town, burning and looting. They looted Indian-owned shops and no one stopped them, but the police organised themselves in time to stop the mobs from doing any damage in the central business district.
Next time, the mobs (and they could include you and me) will be hungrier than they were then and angrier than they were then.
They might not be deterred by orders to disperse. Tear-gas might only make them angrier. Then we would really all be in trouble.
I’m not talking now about one big angry man facing another man who is able to hit him once hard where it hurts.
I’m talking about crowds of people armed with sticks and stones facing the riot police armed with tear-gas, water cannons and guns.
Anyone would have to be crazy to fight against that, but hungry, angry people often are crazy.
I leave you to imagine what follows. Times are hard and will get harder. That means we need to understand why they are hard and act cautiously to put things right.
If we let ourselves get carried away by anger and someone starts telling us who to hit, or provokes us to attack someone cool-headed and better armed than us, then we might have very little understanding or caution.
But we will need them more than we ever needed them before. Let’s not be misled.
Ukraine, 1931.
If we let ourselves get carried away by anger and someone starts telling us who to hit, or provokes us to attack someone cool-headed and better armed than us, then we might have very little understanding or caution.
Well, yes, or you can sit there and die anyway. It's easy to talk, we who aren't there, we who aren't the frogs in the slowly boiling pot, but it's time to get out or fight.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
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