A white man's rage

I ran into a former newspaper colleague of mine a few weeks back, the first time we’d seen each other since I’d gone down to Little Rock to officially run for the state House. This person lightheartedly asked what made me actually go through with it.

I’ve been asked this many times, and I’ve given several variations of the answer to all sorts of folks. But after a beat, this particular time I gave a one-word answer: rage.

It feels a little peculiar for me, being an angry white man right now. Angry white men as a category make me nervous. Angry white men don’t have a monopoly on evil, but their rage has caused the greatest crimes in our nation’s history: the Civil War, segregation and genocide, mass shootings, lynchings, the Tulsa race massacre.

It was an enraged white man who fatally shot several bullets into Renee Good’s body in Minneapolis last week and called her a fucking bitch, evidently because she was insufficiently afraid. It’s an enraged white man in charge of that angry ICE agent, and thousands of others like him, now occupying the Twin Cities. And it’s an enraged white man in charge of the entire federal government, inflicting violence and persecution and hunger onto millions of his fellow Americans and millions of people around the world.

Regardless of how many times these angry white men have claimed to love this country, they don’t. They love an imaginary version of it, a simple and incomplete and fractured version where the crimes of angry white men like them didn’t happen, don’t matter or were, from their wretched perspective, morally correct. They don’t love this real, complicated, messy and colorful place. They hate it. They hate that this country is so much bigger than them, figuratively and literally. They hate how diverse and resilient its people are. And even with all of the branches of government in their hands and other power besides, they are still angry.

In contrast, I’m angry because I love this country as it truly is. I love that our home has taken in more immigrants than any other nation in the history of the world. I love its abolitionist and civil rights movement, its movements for the environment, women, LGBTQ people, labor and Indigenous rights, which have all endured and found successes despite everything working against them. I don’t look away or celebrate this country’s evils. I celebrate the fact that there are always people who oppose them: people who see that our home could be better, that it must be better, and who work to make it so.

The things that make this country great are under attack from a hundred different directions right now. It makes me and folks like me very angry. I feel disgust and fury at a federal government built on the most egregious corruption we’ve ever seen. Its officials violate human decency and rights as easily as they breathe, and they’ve decided that threatening and killing civilians is now standard procedure. I also feel immense contempt for all of the powerful people in this country and this state who, at best, do nothing to stop the madness and, at worst, join in.

The depth and relentlessness of the rage, grief and worry I’ve felt over the past 12 months is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. Every moment that I don’t walk around screaming my lungs out, I feel that I’m squeezing those emotions down inside myself. The smug cliche of a diamond formed under pressure briefly came to mind a while back, but it feels more like a black hole, a bottomless singularity of infinite density. It keeps absorbing emotional mass so that I can continue to function, hiding but always there.

Despite the grim metaphor, I’m working to put that engine of anger to good use, and I’m far from alone. Countless everyday Americans are seeing the violence and intimidation and standing up anyway, including right here in Northwest Arkansas. On the scene of Renee Good’s murder, protesters didn’t turn tail and flee; they stood their ground and screamed out their anger, with one repeating over and over, “You can’t kill us all.” People of all stripes are banding together in Minneapolis to help each other and keep a constant eye on the thugs roving their streets.

Which brings to me to one last thing that makes Trump and his followers angry: the fact that they are going to lose. There will always be more people with bravery, compassion and goodness. As long as humanity exists, there is nothing that can change this. And when nonviolent groups people of principle and courage stick together despite threats of violence, the world moves.

In other words, we are going to win.