It was a special NPR evening talk show. The topic was the emerging change in relationships between men and women. This in the light of the surge of new and deeper revelations of systemic sexism that color those relationships. This particular show was about men. One of the guests was a fellow who had spent a lot of professional energy addressing the issue. He said it was important for men to be outraged at the marginalization of women in any of the ways that occurs. I immediately wondered: Why “outraged”? It is a reaction I have been attempting to free myself of for years.
Outrage has never contributed to my ability to respond in a life-affirming way to anything.
Do I need to be outraged to take meaningful action to counter abuse in any form? I don’t think so.
Or put another way, what desirable outcome can I influence only by being outraged? None so far as I can tell.
Outrage is anger. Anger is unmanaged fear. Fear is feeling a lack of safety. Our difficulty in managing fear––one of the most telling characteristics of humankind at this point in our evolution (and surely one of my least developed skills)––makes outrage seem like a normal, inevitable, even desirable reaction to that which is blatantly harmful.
And yet, outrage perpetuates harm. Yes, it does give voice to the resistance of harm. But what it does not do is create the framework for a constructive response to that harm.
Outrage connotes blame, condemnation, ostracizing––and marginalizing that is not much different than that which triggered the outrage in the first place. I find it a false hope that our life will be enriched, our happiness increased, by dividing the world into “us” and “them”.
The healing of past harms and the nurturing of new, healthier paradigms of relationship between women and men will occur most productively in an environment of kinship and tenderness rather than separation and judgment.
I look at myself and almost everyone else and think: We’re just children here. So young. So immature. Trying to make our way. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be outraged. We’d simply be passionately committed to healing and health.
Imagine hopping into a time machine and zipping forward two thousand years. Try to envision how our future selves will be responding to one another. Seriously. It’s not that hard. A look back from today two thousand years can help. Consider the ways we’ve grown since. Imagine the level of mutual understanding and respect that will be much more commonplace in 4018.
What if we made a commitment to meditate on that feeling, that future reality. What if we went about our life holding that future in our heart?
[For more on this, there’s my essay “Big Person Pants” on my other website CoolMindWarmHeart.com]