I’m always fascinated by those columns where they ask the interviewee, ‘What makes you angry?’
For me, the answer to that question would come in two parts, as I experience two different kinds of anger. One is a bewildered, cold fury, for which the current catalysts are the federal budget and our nation’s treatment of asylum seekers.
Then there is the second kind, which is hot, sudden and violent and makes me want to hit out at the perpetrator, and which rises abruptly from comparatively minor misdemeanors. Such anger courses through me when three people are walking slowly abreast, taking up the entire footpath. When two shop assistants are too busy gossiping to attend to me. When commuters are talking self-importantly on their phone, rendering an entire carriage of people involuntary eavesdroppers. When opinionated people hog the airwaves, never asking someone else’s opinion, or stopping to listen to their story.
The most extreme upsurge of rage in me, however, is caused by men on enormous, noisy machines. These can be hoon cars or jet skis; most often they are overlarge motorbikes, accelerating with a cacophony of earsplitting sound in the middle of a busy street. Witnessing this, I momentarily wish dire things on the perpetrators. I want to catch them up at the next traffic lights and knock them off their monsters; I want them to go screaming around the next corner at a road-hugging angle and fall off.
The common denominator in all the things that make me furious, from the personal to the political is rudeness and its close cousin thoughtlessness. It’s the inability to imagine yourself in another person’s situation.
Everybody is thoughtless on occasion; some people practice it as a matter of course. Sometimes it arises from a keenly developed sense of entitlement that assumes they are more important than anyone else. More often, I suspect, it is literally thoughtlessness – when a person never develops the habit of thinking about others, of reflecting on what it might be like to be that other person. Jesus captured this perfectly in perhaps his most quoted saying when he spoke of loving your neighbour (anyone with whom you come in contact) as yourself.
One of my favourite lines in the Hebrew Bible comes from the prophet Micah: ‘What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and love kindness and walk humbly with your God’. Kindness and humility: underrated virtues that can sound sappy but are actually incredibly strong.
As a Christian, ‘walking with God’ by regular prayer and worship is the best way I’ve found to slowly grow these qualities. But whatever a person’s religion or lack thereof, the practice of justice, kindness and humility would obliterate most of the things that make me mad: from a jet skier arrogantly carving up the water to a government handing down a budget that targets the most vulnerable in our society.
Published in The Age Sunday 22 June 2014