Can an entire country take an anger management course? If so, where do we enroll the United States?
Watching the health-care town halls (or town “hells”) this summer – in which participants, enraged over Barack Obama's proposed health-care reforms, screamed epithets such as “nazi” about their President, looked as though they were about to literally convulse with anger and even packed pistols – I got in touch with another primal emotion: fear.
It's downright scary to see mob rule in action, to witness people so sclerotically angry that they can't even speak in whole sentences as they gasp out their objections to a health-care policy (“nothing short of evil!”) that many of them have not read in any detail, inveighing against “death panels” (not true) and generally looking so threatening I can't imagine any politician walking into any meeting about health care without armed guards and a bulletproof vest.
Even though White House press secretary Robert Gibbs recently made the point that these town halls are being selectively covered, and some of the rage has been stirred up by parties with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, make no mistake: People are not faking this anger. It's real.
But we shouldn't be so sanguine about “American” rage, because up here in the peaceable kingdom, there's plenty o' rage to go around too. At a recent, lively dinner party of friends of varying ideological stripe, we all agreed that this anger is amorphously out there, ready to attach itself to the issue of the day.
From Web forums on any subject to impromptu rants at get-togethers (especially during the recent Toronto garbage strike), from the mail and online comments most columnists now get, there's a vein of anger that threads through public and private discourse these days, much of it fuelled by ignorance and misinformation.
The anger is ugly, free-floating and suggests a level of aggrievement that I think is unprecedented. Whether the rage focuses on such issues as gender equality, gay marriage, health care or crime, the main theme that emerges is “if the other guy wins, I lose.”
In other words, rights have become a zero-sum game, and any tolerance or – eek, what a terrible word – compassion toward any individual or segment of society results in another segment coming up short. They often don't even want to know the facts – they love their rage, it's enlivening and, on some sick level, even fun.
The reasons for this are not hard to discern. We've been through an economic upheaval that has threatened many of our futures. We've had to continually challenge our own prejudices in an increasingly diverse society, adjusting our “tolerance” levels like so many computer upgrades.
And we live in a media culture that stokes fear. Fear of global bankruptcy, fear of falling behind in our lives, fear of street crime. Though the statistics clearly show the crime rate is down significantly in most major Canadian cities, for instance, certain political leaders continue to insist we need to get “tough” on crime, primarily by not voting for their opponents who are “soft” on crime.
So, what's the best way to deal with this anger? I'm not sure I agree with Mr. Obama's almost Zen-like approach to the mob rage. At his own recent town hall in New Hampshire (admittedly much tamer than the others), he placidly said that having this kind of discussion is what the United States is all about. He could have added that this nuclear level of anger makes us all tone-deaf to anyone else's point of view, but I suppose he didn't want to sound like the Therapist-in-Chief.
He did state one undeniable truth: Most citizens need to focus more on the facts to make up their minds (although his administration hasn't made it easier to obtain those facts). Listening to Democrats fuzzily explain how their health-care system can be made fairer – a notion that becomes acutely uncomfortable to many Americans when it involves their government – has been an exercise in frustration, even for people who don't feel like packing heat.
I tried to conjure up a scenario in which every town hall in Canada from the prairies to the cities was suddenly overflowing with angry, howling citizens demanding to be heard, and I came up with one: If the government ever decreed it was taking away our medicare and making our health-care system as financially punitive as the U.S. system, that's when our rage would hit the road. That is when we would have our own town “hells.”
In the meantime, that irony aside, learning to channel our anger effectively would probably make us all – north and south of the border – far more powerful citizens. More civil, anyway.
