Outraged

 

I remember fondly my days volunteering for my city's school board. Oh sure, I don't wish the punishing schedule of long meetings and agonizing decisions on myself in the present. But I'm honored to have served when I did, and I'm proud of the service I did render.

One thing that was important to me from the beginning was leaning into absorbing the anger of people connected to the school district: teachers, employees, and especially parents. Something a former school board member was gracious enough to impress upon us newbies when we were getting oriented was that an outraged public citizen yelling at you at a meeting was a good thing, because it meant they were still engaged, hoping for change, or at the very least not resigned to remaining in a bad situation. We were encouraged to lean into that anger, to get angry too, and to do what we could to resolve the issue.

Without going into details, I think what was enraging for folks was not just that they had felt wronged (or, for parents, that their child had been wronged), but that there didn't seem to be any way to right the wrong. The bureaucracy was too large, the people in charge seemingly too distant, the pain too great for any sort of satisfying resolution. We probably use the word "trauma" too casually, but this is characteristic trauma, not just the depth of the pain but the sense of not being able to see a way out of it. 

So it never bothered me when people yelled at me, since I usually shared their perspective, so even if I wasn't directly as hurt by it, it was not hard for me to empathize and feel anger too. Plus, most of the time, they weren't yelling at me anyway, I just happened to be the available recipient for their outrage, which I was truly happy to be, since I saw that as an important part of my job and a critical part of the healing process.

I think about this a lot as I see many of our young people making fun of or even celebrating the chilling murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO on the streets of Manhattan earlier this month. A recent poll found that over 40 percent of people age 18 to 29 surveyed felt the killing was at least somewhat if not totally justified. Which, at first blush, is an absolutely unconscionable opinion, that the appropriate response to a company that you feel is participating in wrong is to murder the head of that company in cold blood.

As a democracy, we value things like rule of law, "innocent until proven guilty," and a fair and balanced justice system. And so instances in our history when "vigilante justice" was not only not roundly condemned but outright celebrated are interesting ones to probe, as to why we believe what we believe. And my most charitable take on the large proportion of young people who celebrated the murder of the health insurance CEO is that they are outraged and are desperately looking for a place to express that outrage.

Health insurance, personal finances, and capitalism itself are areas where an increasing number of our youth feel not only anger but resignation. From this worldview, the system is broken, people are hurting, and there is no way to change things without outright revolution. Well, revolutions are messy and bloody, so if it takes ordering hits on corporate execs, throwing paint on Teslas, and blocking traffic during rush hour, more and more of our youth are finding sympathy with mess and blood.

I still think it is wrong to celebrate the cold-blooded murder of a business leader on the sidewalk. But I think that's my point. The fact that it is so clearly wrong, and yet so many of our young people justify it, tells me that the outrage they feel is quite something. What can we do to address this?