I’m very angry these days.
Some people think that’s a good thing, that if people get angry enough they’ll do something.
I think that’s bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.
Back in my karate days, my teacher sometimes tried to make me angry to make me fight better. It never worked.
Here’s the thing: I get angry when I feel like there’s nothing I can do.
Now maybe if you made me angry enough to trigger blind rage, I might act, but I’m pretty sure the resulting action would not be a good thing. In general, people responding out of rage cause a lot of harm, even if their rage is justified.
What I need in order to act is to be centered enough to see options.
And it’s really fucking hard to keep my center these days in spite of forty years in martial arts, because there’s just so much destruction and harm going on and many of the tools we have available are slow and ineffective or – even worse – compromised.
So I’m angry, though I’m struggling to find enough center to do something constructive.
On the “how to deal with the destruction of the United States” front – a major reason why I’m angry – I have become involved with Unbreaking, which is an organization documenting the damage done to our government and the responses to it.
It took me awhile, but I’ve found a niche there working on summarizing litigation in the data security area. I spent years working as a legal editor and reporter, so combing through opinions and dockets is something I know how to do.
Figuring out what’s happening and summarizing it: that’s something I can do. So it helps.
But some of the other things I’m angry about are not directly tied to the current regime destroying most of what actually worked in the U.S. government. Rather, they are things that would exist even if we had responsible leadership in Washington.
Our electric bills keep going up because PG&E is an investor-owned utility that puts its shareholders way ahead of its customers. Their online bill-paying system is also borked, which just adds to my irritation.
PG&E is also trying to undermine rooftop solar because they make more money out of power lines. Mind you, I live in the part of the San Francisco Bay Area that is referred to as “the sunny side of the Bay.” PV on all the roofs that get sun coupled with batteries would more than power the East Bay.
Don’t forget the idiocies of health care. I had to pay out of pocket for a medical test ordered by my doctor this year because even though the smart minds in medicine think it is an excellent way to determine risks for heart disease, insurance (including Medicare) has decided not to cover it.
It wasn’t a lot of money – compared to problems people have when their life-saving surgery is cancelled, it isn’t even worth complaining about.
Also, the cost of my drug plan is about to double, which means I need to figure out if I can get a better one. Mind you, the only prescription drug I take is an established generic and I’m pretty sure that if I paid the whole cost out of pocket I’d spend way less than I do for the drug plan.
I mean, a lot of the things that grate on me are relatively small – I’m pretty fortunate. They just add up, and also make it clear that other people are really getting screwed.
But there are the bigger things that aren’t just caused by our disaster of a federal government. There’s climate change, for example. There was just a record storm surge in Alaska from the remnants of a typhoon (a typhoon is what you call a hurricane when it’s in the Pacific Ocean). It’s just the most recent example of weather disasters.
Even here in California, where we pay lip service to progressive values, there isn’t near enough being done to counter climate change. Solar and wind are getting to be incredibly cheap, but note what I said about PG&E earlier.
Then there’s the absurd failure to learn from the pandemic. I see all kinds of moaning about the effect of the lockdowns and online school, but I don’t see any effort to make sure all public indoor spaces have the kind of ventilation and filtration needed to minimize transmission of airborne viruses.
Not to mention that we still don’t have any vaccines to block transmission of Covid – despite plenty of good research done on that. And that’s in addition to the absolute destruction of public health by the brain worm in charge of Health and Human Services.
I’ve got quite a long list of other things, but you get the gist. (I haven’t even mentioned so-called “AI.”)
What really makes me angry is that we have the skill and knowledge to do something about all these things. As the saying goes, this isn’t rocket science or brain surgery. We just keep not doing them.
So I’m angry.
It’s getting old, being angry.