Rage

I simply do not understand the level of rage it takes to sustain this.

It is my considered opinion that, if you hate somebody enough to saw everything you jointly own in half, you couldn't have possibly ever loved. Her...or yourself.

Many of the commenters agreed with me, but many others found this hysterically funny, noted that "some women deserve this"...and one guy wrote "this is awesome...he's done what every guy's thought of doing at one time or another."

"Not all guys," I wrote back. "Some of us aren't children."

"Some of us aren't liars, either, Ken," he retorted.

Really?

Yes, I've had a couple of messy breakups in my younger years, when everything was messy. Yes, of course emotions ran high--which meant raised voices and tears on both sides. I don't hold with hitting people--it doesn't solve anything. And destroying property--what are you, five?

I'll admit, I've always been really sensitive to destruction in any form. It's one of the things that made me feel so isolated from my peers for such a long period of time, before I decided screw the social consequences, I am right and they are wrong. Boys in general, seem to love destroying things, the more spectacular the explosion, the better. I ask people why they love this and they can't answer beyond "it's so cool!"

Not helpful.

Cool? Huh? If it's somebody else's stuff, do they think it's cool when you destroy it? If it's your own, don't you just have to replace it? And if it doesn't really belong to anyone, if it's just sitting there waiting to be destroyed--isn't "leaving it alone" an option?

I find myself having to explain my way of thinking quite often, because it is so utterly alien to so many. Like them, I can't tell you for sure where it came from: as far as I know, it's always been here. Any violence I saw from earliest childhood, whether it was perpetrated on a person, an animal, or an inanimate object, affected me, often to the point of bawling. This perplexed and worried my parents...I was actually put in therapy for a time because "I couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality". Why are you upset, Kenny? That's just television. It's not real. Monster trucks: Those are old junker cars, Kenny. They're not good for anything anymore and it's not as if the metal can feel  pain when the truck's squashing it.

Still destructive. I can feel the rage, even simulated rage on television, and it's that I'm reacting to. And with the monster trucks and demolition derbies and such like, obviously there's no rage there. What offends me in cases like that--and it's a deep offense, I actually have a very strong urge to cover my eyes and scream even now--is the casual nature of the destruction, the sheer GLEE people feel watching it unfold. My first thought when an inanimate object is destroyed in front of me is either "that belongs to somebody" or "somebody made that". That was built for a purpose, damnit, and whatever purpose it had surely didn't involve getting blown up.

For some reason I'm put in mind of an old housemate of mine. Second year university. He drank like a thing that drinks a lot. A lot a lot. Like... a barf a lot. And every time he'd wake up from his blackout in a puddle of his own puke, he'd announce to everyone in a terribly put-upon voice that that was it, he was done with drinking alcohol. One time I think that vow lasted almost an entire week.

Obviously an addiction, right? I could never get it through my thick skull why the ralphtastic results of last week's binge never seemed to seep through his thick skull before he embarked on this week's. I was deep into my thirties when I first read Stephen King's memoir, ON WRITING, in which he discusses his alcoholism. He writes that it used to infuriate him to see people leaving half-full bottles of wine on restaurant tables. "Aren't you going to DRINK that?", he'd rage in his head. When someone asked him how much he drank, King looked at him as if he was an idiot and said, "All of it."

I think our society has a collective addiction to violence that makes alcoholism look like a trifle. And unlike alcoholism, the addiction to violence is fully normalized. It infects popular culture to an insane degree that you have to stand outside to really appreciate. Movies. Television. Music. Videogames. It's everywhere.



And it's normalized. It's expected on some level that if you think somebody has wronged you, you can take it out on his stuff. It's played for laughs in many cases, because rage is funny, apparently. I've heard people defend the violence in, say, videogames by noting it's much better if somebody blows up a virtual city than a real one--and again I'm at a loss to find a motive for blowing up things virtual or real. Free-floating rage. It's gotta be. Where does all that anger come from?

I'll grant you my reaction to being wronged probably isn't much better. I figure I must have deserved it: it feeds that ravenous beast called Insecurity that lives deep in my gut. I've reacted that way all my life and seem helpless to do it any other way...and so I'm working on  being a CREATOR rather than a REACTOR. Those two words are the same word...only the "C" has moved. When you change the way you "C", you can create, rather than react. And creation is, of course, the opposite of destruction. It's fed with love, not hate, and as far as I'm concerned, its fruits taste much better.