Our Anger, and Where to Put It
“I’m so angry. And I have no idea where to put it.”
This was Della Street, the firebrand character on HBO’s new Perry Mason series, lamenting the state of her world just a few days into her team’s defense on a murder trial with all the odds stacked against them.
But, she may as well have been speaking for me — and for all of us.
Trigger warning, here’s a list of things we all know and are sick to death of hearing about: There’s a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic happening, the economy and livelihoods of millions of are suffering more than any other time since the Great Depression because of it, domestic abuse counts are up as is hunger and unemployment. There’s a once-in-a-generation reckoning with race relations that has led to important change, but not without anger, violence, and death. And there’s an abundance of national and local leadership obscenely ill-equipped to deal with any of it, leading to more uncertainty, sickness, inequality, suffering, and death. And that’s not even mentioning the climate crisis and the rising natural disasters case counts happening right along with it — people displaced from windstorms in the Midwest, record-breaking heatwaves that make storms and start wildfires, and earthquakes in places there were never earthquakes before.