The angry person reacts in anger and causes others to be angry, and a cycle begins.  My hope is that I'm able to be a person who ends such a cycle, a person who reacts to anger with love and understanding, because the angry people need that more than anything else.  Reacting in anger is merely perpetuating these people's belief that their anger is justified, but reacting in love may get them to question whether or not their anger is justified, effective, and/or helpful to them.

We can't psychoanalyze everyone we meet.  We can't say this person is angry because she's been neglected, or this one is angry because he's trying to compensate for feelings of inadequacy.  We need to separate the anger from the person, the creation of God who stands before us and who deserves our love.

When I'm tempted to react angrily myself, I try to remember to ask myself this question:  Am I contributing to the anger in the world, or am I contributing to the peace and love in the world?  I need to contribute to the love--we all do. Love is the only power that can cause a permanent change.

Of course, we have to look at the other side of anger--the side that gets us to act when we see an injustice done to another person, the side that causes the feeling of righteous indignation that gets us moving and feeling for others.  There is injustice in the world, and as Arthur Ponsoby points out below, if our lack of anger is a sign of indifference, then it's a big problem for us and for those people with whom we share the world.

But we still have to control this anger, as Aristotle points out below.  Unchecked and misdirected anger is destructive, and if we're to be angry at all, we want that anger to be constructive, not destructive.  Controlling our anger takes learning and practice, and we have to keep learning from our mistakes and the mistakes of others to learn how to use our anger effectively, and to know when to recognize anger that's justified, and anger that's a reflection, a symptom, of something else that's going wrong in our lives.

Anger destroys the angry person and all those around him or her. The angry father
can cause fear and terror among his children. The angry wife and mother
can manipulate with a force and subtlety that can be felt for years.
Open anger roars through human relations with a destructive force--a firestorm.
The hidden anger that burns and attacks and manipulates can last for years.
It destroys the underbrush; it twists and poisons the ground growth.
And so with us. The ferocious exterior flame is uncontrollable except over
a long period of work and time. We must isolate our anger and allow it to burn itself out.

Edward J. Lavin

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Eugene Carman

Rhodes' slave! Selling shoes and gingham,
Flour and bacon, overalls, clothing, all day long
For fourteen hours a day for three hundred and thirteen days
for more than twenty years.
Saying "Yes'm" and "Yes, sir" and "Thank you"
A thousand times a day, and all for fifty dollars a month.
Living in this stinking room in the rattle-trap "Commercial."
And compelled to go to Sunday School, and to listen
To the Rev. Abner Peet one hundred and four times a year
For more than an hour at a time,
Because Thomas Rhodes ran the church
As well as the store and the bank.
So while I was tying my neck-tie that morning
I suddenly saw myself in the glass:
My hair all gray, my face like a sodden pie.
So I cursed and cursed: You damned old thing!
You cowardly dog! You rotten pauper!
You Rhodes' slave! Till Roger Baughman
Thought I was having a fight with someone,
And looked through the transom just in time
To see me fall on the floor in a heap
From a broken vein in my head.

Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology

Anger in its time and place,
May assume a kind of grace.
It must have some reason in it,
And not last beyond a minute.
If to further lengths it go,
It does into malice grow.
'Tis the difference we can see
'Twixt the serpent and the bee.
If the latter you provoke,
It inflicts a hasty stroke,
Put you to some little pain,
But it never stings again.

Close in tufted bush or brake
Lurks the poison-swelled snake
Nursing up his cherished wrath;
In the purlieus* of his path,
In the cold, or in the warm,
Mean him good, or mean him harm,
Wheresoever fate may bring you
The vile snake will always sting you.

Charles and Mary Lamb

*place where one goes often

The Fence      Author Unknown
The (Ig)Noble Flames of Anger      Lucy Lopez
When You See "Red"      Rhoberta Shaler

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