Is anger justifiable ?

Anger. It seems that people LOOK for ways to vent their anger.

Righteous anger is the best, because you can feel justified about it. But in the end, it's the same anger conservatives felt toward Obama and the same anger liberals feel about Trump and the same anger neo-cons feel about homosexuals and Blacks. On that subject, briefly, it's not fair to call those people racist because the largest non-White group taking over this country are Latinos with a 43% population increase between 2000-2010 compared to a 9% increase in people identifying as Black. And a 7% decrease in people identifying as White, possibly because they're ashamed LoL but anyway, these people are not racist, they just hate Black people.

Do we need to own our anger ? It does get confusing when hatred of one group gets presented as hatred of other groups, but we do need to address the root cause of the anger. The same people who decry government involvement in their lives urge government involvement in other people's lives. Anger usually stems from a deep-rooted conviction of an injustice toward that person, usually at an early age. Sometimes it's a problem with fetal brain development. People who grow up healthy and happy and balanced simply don't have that level of rage.

So in the end, the government tries to quell the rage by imposing our gigantic behemoth legal system which drains all hope of swift justice and fair punishment under its mammoth burden of conflicting regulations. Such as what this week overturned the life imprisonment sentence of the younger of the "beltway shooters" because after 13 years, somebody finally realized that he was 18 when he was arrested, but not 18 yet when he committed the crime, and therefore "less culpable". I tell you, magic happens on your 18th birthday. The FAIRY OF WISDOM visits you at the stroke of midnight and sprinkles enlightenment dust on your brain. Suddenly you are able to make judgments you were unable to make before, like joining the Military, having sex, driving a car, voting, drinking liquor, smoking...... oh wait, each of those has a different fairy in every State who visits at different ages to sprinkle the appropriate dust on your brain, so you might be allowed to drive a car, but not kill people yet, etc.

These value judgments are extremely unpalatable to people who perceive the world as, ironically, what we call "black and white". It's like a wolf killing your sheep but you can't do anything because the wolf is an endangered species. But maybe the sheep is an endangered breed. Maybe it's your entire livelihood. Maybe it's your right to defend your property, if the sheep is your property. What if the wolf is also your property ? What if it's your child, not a sheep. What if it's a child who killed your child yesterday ? These are value judgments and this is why we have a gazillion lawyers and court cases take decades. In effect, this is encouraging anger rather than diffusing it.

The only solution is to teach the moral values we want our children to hold, but then our own moral values might be imbued by hate and anger. It's an inevitable result of our complex society. You bet some overly controlling governments like that of China and the Soviet Union recognized this and instituted State education which firmly rooted the desired values in the emerging generations. To an extent, we do the same thing with school curricula. Then you have the parents telling their children not to believe some things they are taught in school, and you have a mess.

The problem is cleaning up the mess. We think we can, but we can't. We naively believe that outlawing guns, drugs, child sex, pornography, other religions, fraud, theft, battery, murder, treason and exceeding the speed limit will eradicate this things from our society. We can't. Our only hope for mitigation is looking at the root causes and training our population to deal with them. There's a reason some people crave sex with children. There's a reason some people crave killing other people. We have to do what we can to address those reasons, because otherwise, we will foster a culture of vigilantism which does not thrive on reason. Mark the Salem Witch Trials and the Spanish Inquisition. The KKK, the Crusades, the McCarthy commission and ethnic cleansing. Mark "Lord Of The Flies".