It's a choice between anger management and perversion

Have you heard that lots of people are angry with the government?  Probably so.  Does it really amount to anything?  Well, yes, it does amount to something:  it's made a mess of the government.

Anybody who is really, truly, honestly and sincerely angry with government ought to accept responsibility for the consequences of that anger and act accordingly.  I'm not trying to belittle the sanctity of anybody's feelings here; I'm simply bewildered by people who seem to wallow in anger without taking any kind of constructive approach to resolve the origins of the anger.  Bewildered by them and, frankly, becoming fed up with them, too.

Case in point:  the current partial shut-down of the Federal government.  A recurrent theme expressed by the right-wing Republicans in the House of Representatives is that they are justified in shutting down government operations because they are angry with the government, or because their constituents are angry with government.  (If you haven't heard this, then you've been living under a rock for the last several months.)

The true feelings and emotions of any single Congressperson are an unknown to me, but insofar as the Republican constituencies are concerned they might have a point there.  A Pew Research report just recently released shows that fully 41% of respondents who identify themselves as conservative Republicans are "angry" with government.  In fact, the title of the release is "Anger at Government Most Pronounced among Conservative Republicans."  That by itself tells much of the story.

Being stewards of the public trust, therefore, the Republican members of the House of Representatives are dutifully executing their responsibilities to their home district constituents by conveying that anger through legislative actions to shut down government operations.

In other words, if you're a Republican voter, and you are angry with government, then you are causing it to be shut down.  Well, maybe your elected Representative is contributing a little bit to that event, too, because it's likely that person is also angry at government.  But, it all begins and ends with you, the angry voter.

Feel the power.

Feel the power of perversion, that is.  Because anger without management yields no constructive solution, merely continued anger.  And most truly angry people, I believe, focus their anger on external targets by blaming somebody else for the problem that is causing the anger.  The target of their anger is "the government."  It's a broad-brush indictment, with little or no identifiable and employable management that could be used to discern causes and effects.

For all its faults, we live in a democratically-governed society, and who has elected that government?  Why, come to think of it, it's the angry people who have elected at least some part of that government!  Fortunately for our future, it was the non-angry people who elected most of the government last November.  A fact, of course, that serves only to inflame the passions of the angry voter.

Human nature being what it is, angry people are not going to persist in directing their anger at themselves for long.  Therefore, since they are giving only short shrift to the root causes of their anger, they will develop nothing constructive to offer as a resolution to whatever problems they see in government.  Nonetheless, the anger demands a resolution, even if it is only temporary, and so instead of something constructive we are left with the destructive event of the shut-down.

The logic of anger requires an outlet of righteous pain caused by tear-down and destruction, instead of finding long-term benefits out of building and construction.

Be gone, angry people!  You have nothing of value to offer.  Enjoy the self-flagellating bliss of your anger, because that's the closest you are going to come to gaining satisfaction out of the puerile self-importance that angry people attach to actions of theirs that cause harm to others.

For the government shut-down is not an abstract event.  It has tangible, daily-life implications to the 800,000 or so government workers who are now unemployed, without justifiable compensation for their time and opportunities.  And so, too, for the thousands of employees of private-sector government contractors who have been laid off because of lack of budgeted funding for planned projects; a number which will grow dramatically as this shut-down drags on.

Anger is non-professional; as such, it has no right to a place in a professional work environment.  Government certainly ought to be a professional work environment.  Ah, but perhaps you know a person who is angry at government and believes that there is no such thing as a professional governmental work environment?  What a hypocrite!  The angry voter has no qualification to judge professionalism, since protracted anger precludes professional behavior and thought.  The angry voter is merely projecting his or her own non-professionalism onto others.

Anger, of course, cannot be legislated away, nor can I or anyone else make it go away through arguments such as this that appeal to rationality.  The most that can be done to it is to put it into perspective, which is this:  If we are going to be a successful democracy, it will happen in spite of voter anger, because anger without constructive resolution is non-contributory to the political process, and therefore a perversion of that process.

Which brings us to the question of the day:  How to resolve the current conflict over the Federal budget?  I suppose something will emerge over the coming days, but one side of this argument is clearly driven by anger--anger at President Obama, and anger at the Affordable Care Act--and, if the past is any guide, it just doesn't seem possible that any constructive solution elements will emerge from that anger.  The likely outcome is that the House Republicans will have to swallow their anger, contain the anger of their most conservative constituents, and capitulate.

Unless, of course, they can get control of their anger.  (When pigs fly.)

As much as I would like to see that kind of capitulation, I also have to admit that capitulation will probably lead to more anger, producing an environment that is unlikely to yield anything more constructive in the future than it has yielded so far to date.

And that is likely to be our political outlook until such time as the angry voters can learn how to do anger management, and substitute the constructive results of that management for their current perversion of the political process.