You are better than this.

You are not a hostile person, not a picker of fights. You’re a Boy Scout troop leader, Friend of the Library, PTA volunteer. Last year, you even called in and donated money during a National Public Radio fund drive.

And yet you have these moments when the worst parts of your nature come to the fore. Moments when the world seems to be conspiring against you and the frustration builds inside you and the frustration turns to rage.

This morning, for example, you were running late for an 8:30 meeting and you just wanted to get your latte and bagel from Starbucks and run. Of course the guy in front of you in line had to spend 10 minutes talking to the woman behind the counter about that most fascinating of topics, the weather. You’re ashamed to admit it now, but you were on the verge of balling up your $10 bill, throwing it across the counter, and screaming for service.

Actually, the whole day has been a little like this. At work, you had a tense exchange with your boss about what he called “peculiarities” in your expense account.

Then, on your way home, as you were inching toward a tollbooth on 294, it happened again. You had 20 minutes to get home, pick up your daughter, and drive her over to her dance lessons. No chance, right? The traffic was going nowhere when suddenly, thank God, another lane opened up. You went for it. So did the guy in your blind spot. A Hummer, cutting right across your bow like you weren’t even there. And off you went, laying on the horn, screaming some embarrassingly unoriginal obscenities, spittle flying, face contorted. If you could have caught a peek of yourself in the rearview at that moment, you would have seen a person who appeared utterly insane.

Here’s the thing—and maybe you’ll find this comforting or maybe you’ll find it frightening. There are a lot of you out there.

 

Rage seems to be all the rage lately. Look around; it’s not difficult to conclude that the world is getting angrier and angrier. Our politics are angry, dominated by Bush-haters and Clinton-haters and even Nader-haters. Our popular music is angry, spiked with misogynistic rants and paranoid fantasies. Our highways run like rivers of anger. As Peter Wood points out in his book A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter, 2007), automakers are even making angrier-looking cars, with grills that seem to snarl at whatever gets in their way.

Are we really that angry? It’s not an easy question to answer. There simply aren’t a lot of practical ways to measure how pissed off people are. Judging by the space on the nation’s bookshelves taken up by books about anger, we seem to be living in a golden age of Wrath Lit. You can find books about the perils of anger, books about how anger can work for you, and books that relate personal battles with rage.