Issues

Anger: A legitimate emotion for a columnist?

A recent (congenial) conversation with a schoolmate now (alas!) in the upper echelons of the Sri Lankan Cabinet provoked the comment by him that I was an “angry writer,” or something to that effect.  While this was not said in anything resembling a disparaging or condemnatory tone, it did appear to contain a note of bemusement and was placed in the context of a reference also to my two lifetime-committed Trotskyist siblings, one of them no longer among the living.

It did get me to thinking, particularly since I have of late, quite often, expressed the opinion that anger is a debilitating and wasteful emotion and should be converted into something more productive wherever and whenever possible.  There used to be a time, a long time at that, when I insisted that anger, particularly the white-hot kind, expressed in as articulate a manner as was humanly possible, was a great soul-cleanser and something one needed to use for purposes of intellectual and emotional catharsis from time to time.  What I have been saying more recently might appear at considerable variance from that older stance.

Writing of a journalistic nature is something I have come to in the twilight of my years, so to speak.  My predilection throughout my youth and more productive years had been for political, social and community activism of one kind or another.  Thus, it is to be expected that the attitudes I held and emotions I displayed in projecting them have come through in my writing to this and other publications. 

Cold objectivity

Suffice it to say that I would be hypocritical if I said that I seek to bring an absolute and cold objectivity to anything I say or write.  In fact, I don’t think there is anyone who can truthfully make that claim.  Truth, yes; fairness and civility, of course, because I believe all of those to be the sine qua non of any kind of communication of substance. 

However, while one seeks to be the fly on the wall of the room encompassing all or part of humankind, it would be hypocritical to pretend that one can tether one’s responses to injustices and inhuman behaviour to an extent that one merely records those instances in some emotionless, Simon-pure manner.  I would, in fact, suggest that the very effort to achieve such detachment would be indicative of a diminution of one’s essential humanity.

What one gets to observe at first hand in Sri Lanka is a destruction of civility and a civilisation whose origins go back – way, way back in history – and that had advanced, taking its people along with it for the most part. 

Hard to reverse

What is also evident is that destruction is very comprehensive, deep and very difficult to reverse, particularly given the xenophobic underpinnings of that process where it seems that a master group  has the right to do whatever it pleases, irrespective of the consequences to the rest of the citizenry.

Those who are visiting this destruction upon Sri Lanka, essentially, belong to two groups: those who know no better by virtue of their being insulated from what has gone on and goes on in the rest of the world, and those who cynically say and do things that are calculated, purely and simply, to advance their agendas without any concern for what negative fall-out there might be from their conduct.  One’s behaviour can be said to be driven by stupidity while the other is motivated by cupidity without boundaries.

Anger justified

Given those circumstances, isn’t anger and the expression of it justifiable?

Can one not get really mad at what the rural poor have to put up with while their dignity and right to a decent life is taken away by some two-bit politician or their lackeys?

Isn’t one justified in getting very angry and showing that anger at the blatant disregard of the rule of law which might as well not exist as far as certain favoured citizens of this country are concerned?

Isn’t one justified in expressing one’s anger at those who cock the proverbial snook at society by defrauding government organisations and other entities without the consequences that should follow in any functioning democracy?

Isn’t one justified in getting truly angry at increasingly common instances of blatant thuggery and intimidation by those favoured by the authorities, the miscreants walking away from such offences without even the proverbial rap across the knuckles?

Isn’t one justified in getting blazing mad at the wanton destruction of the environment of a beautiful country by those who do so for financial gain or even to simply flex their political muscle in order to demonstrate that they are immune from punishment of any kind?

Isn’t one justified in getting supremely angry at the blatant disregard for the rules of the road by those who end up causing all kinds of carnage on the highway while traffic policemen look idly on, giving out the occasional speeding ticket to someone exceeding the stipulated speed limit by a kilometer or two per hour?

Isn’t one justified in expressing one’s anger at the blatant disregard by so-called “places of worship” which crank up their amplification systems at all hours of the day and night despite a Supreme Court order clearly laying down guidelines in that connection?

Given our circumstances, aren’t we, in Sri Lanka, justified in acting on Peter Finch’s famous line in Network: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more?”