Have you ever wondered why liberals, particularly activist liberals, are so angry all the time? It’s not that they’re angry people, or at least it’s not just that they’re angry people, it’s for a different, very important reason – anger overrides logic. Anger is kryptonite to logic, and for liberalism to work, to attract a large audience, logic has to be overridden.
You’ve undoubtedly heard at least some of the news over the past few years coming out of college campuses, the shout-downs and the riots when an Ann Coulter or Ben Shapiro go to a school to commit the sin of disagreeing with liberal orthodoxy. There have been dozens of such events in recent times and not one member of the angry mobs could articulate a reason for it other than they were angry.
They, of course, didn’t say they were angry, they couched it in buzzwords like “hate speech” and “intolerance,” but none could explain exactly what someone they wouldn’t let speak had said that came anywhere close to these meaningless concepts and got their underwear so tight. But angry they were.
If you’ve ever broken something because you were angry that it wasn’t working property, or cursed a piece of furniture to hell and back because you caught your pinky toe on one of its legs, you’ve experienced your logic being overridden by emotion. The remote didn’t have its batteries die because it knew you were tired, and the coffee table didn’t jump out in front of your foot because it was mad over the fact that you didn’t use a coaster. Your anger took over and you acted stupidly.
Now imagine a large percentage of a political party living in that space and you have the Democrats.
Long before, but particularly since the election of Donald Trump, the political left has turned the rhetoric designed to inspire anger up to 11. March after march of everything from women to science to immigrants, you name it and a faction of the left has taken to the streets over it. None of these things were ever actually under any threat from any action, realized or proposed, taken by the President, but facts no longer stand in the way of a good liberal story…if they ever did.
And it’s not just political anger the left stirs now, at least not obviously political anger.
After decades of dividing Americans by race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., various grievance groups now serve as pawns to be kept angry, just simmering and occasionally boiling, until the pressure cooker they’re creating is needed to serve a political end.
But some of those pressure cookers are on automatic now, beyond the control of their creators. Nancy Pelosi was shouted down by activists for illegal immigrants a few months ago, not over her refusal to push amnesty while she was Speaker of the House, but because they were angry and she was there.
While Pelosi is stringing the so-called DREAMers along, blaming Republicans, protesters didn’t come to call her out for her lip-service only approach to immigration issues, they came because they wanted everything NOW! Even when she tried to tell them what they wanted to hear, they weren’t interested in hearing it.
The anger over manufactured victimhood among the various interest groups Democrats have herded into different pens is now on automatic pilot, with no affront too slight to bring about outrage. Even competing outrages over the same things.
The movie Black Panther opened this weekend, which would normally be your average blockbuster superhero movie. But because the majority of the cast and crew who worked on the film were black, it’s been assigned an important meaning because the races have had a wedge driven between them by the left.
There are white liberals wondering if they should stay away on opening weekend so they don’t deny a black person a seat in the theater. There are people fantasizing about the fictional country of Wakanda, where the movie is set, and proclaiming it this fiction a weird kind of blow to centuries old colonialism. I swear, people are so out of their minds irrational right now that a con artist could sell luxury vacation travel to Wakanda and make a fortune right now.
But there are others upset over the lack of gay characters in the movie. Yes, you read that right. Gizmodo ran a piece entitled, “Marvel Misses Another Easy Opportunity for LGBTQ Representation With Black Panther.” To save you a click, apparently in one iteration of the comic books there is a lesbian couple and their sexuality is not addressed in the movie. This, like everything else in life lately, has people angry.
I, in the name of compassion, posited, “It must be an awful existence to wake up, eat breakfast and think, “I can’t really enjoy this because the Trix Rabbitt isn’t gay” or “I can’t eat Cap’n Crunch because I’m not sure his Navy allows transgender people to serve.”
This snarky joke was greeted with a series of varying, “we just want to be represented on the screen” responses because, it seems, people can’t even enjoy 2 hours of escapism at a superhero movie unless there is someone validating their existence on the screen.
I know I’m cynical, but if you need your existence, whatever it happens to be, to be externally validated, especially in entertainment, your life is missing something you won’t find looking to others.
Like a tire fire, the rage rages on. It’s still mostly contained, but it is spreading. We’ve already had one incident of a member of the outrage class try to kill as many Republicans as possible last summer on a baseball field in Virginia and the left didn’t skip a beat. If attempted mass murder didn’t slow them down, that leaves success as the only thing that might. Which is horrifying.
“Feel, don’t think; just act” is a dangerous mindset, yet it’s what the left is conditioning people to do. Coupled with tribalism and victimhood and there is nothing short of tragedy at the end of this road. I hope I’m wrong, but I see nothing to make me think I am; and I hope the left stops this insanity, but I see nothing to indicate they will.