Why am I not angry?

My girlfriend said that what she really wanted from me, as far as the Cornell 7 were concerned, was for me to be angry too. So I thought about it: why am I not angry? It’s fucking weird, actually, that I’m not. Women being harrassed and violated by men, when I witness it in real life, makes me about as mad as I know how to get. Like, see red and barely be able to control myself sort of mad. So why doesn’t reading about it in the news make me mad too?

As I thought about it, I realized I haven’t been mad, or even really sad, about anything I’ve read for a long time. Which is insane, because the news is more or less an endless stream of things to be angry and sad and horrified by, if you’re paying even the slightest bit of attention. The last time I felt much of anything about something going on in the world beyond my immediate surroundings was in the first couple months of the genocide in Gaza. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. By it, I really mean the videos of it on Instagram. I was halfway bedridden by the horror of seeing blown-apart children on my phone at every hour of the day. I know many other people were too (and still are). But eventually I started feeling that spending my time and emotional energy watching people get blown to pieces 10,000 miles away wasn’t really helping those people any^[1], and it was also making me unable to help create any other change in the world, because all I could do was lie in my bed and look at my phone in paralyzed horror. So I deleted Instagram, and I started focusing on helping the parts of the world that are right in front of me instead. That’s the place from which I wrote this piece, which describes a worldview that I still hold.

But somewhere in the past year or so, I lost track of the scale of the problems we’re facing. Or at least, I lost the ability to feel anything about those problems, at scale. I feel angry when I pass the clearcuts near my house, and horror when I see the homeless people in Portland driven insane by the most addictive chemicals we’ve ever engineered. I feel sad about the postindustrial decay and neglect that is engulfing my adopted county (and native country) and its people, and I feel angry (yet unsurprised^[2]) that far-right nationalism is capturing the righteous fury and sense of abandonment of the people who were left behind by corporations and neoliberal governments once those people could no longer be turned into shareholder value. But I seem to have lost my broader anger. All I feel when I read about the horror du jour is a sort of unsurprised, emotionless fatalism. I have not figured out how to see a bunch of people getting bombed into bits Monday, a set of horrific rape charges Tuesday, a school getting shot up on Wednesday, a national park getting turned into a strip mine Thursday, and on and on while still actually feeling any of it without being incapacitated. So I don’t feel it. At some point I leaned too far into the belief that to create change I need to be able to be effective in the world, and lost many of the feelings that made me care to be effective in the first place.

I want to learn to be angry again. Angry about the Cornell 7 and Gisèle Pelicot (for whom I remember being similarly confused about my lack of anger), angry about Gaza, angry about all of it. Some people might read this and think, fuck you for choosing not to feel it when women don’t have that option. Fuck you for not being angry about Gaza when Gazans don’t have a choice. Fuck you for not feeling the world’s myriad and endless horrors, when for the people on whom these horrors are visited they are not a news item but a hellish reality. And I don’t blame anyone who feels that way. But I need to find some way to feel it without being overcome by it. I think it’s normal – and maybe the only fully humane response – to be rendered useless by the industrial violence and conscious neglect and intentional destruction in the world, and yet I also think that to engage in the seemingly doomed struggle for a better world we need to be well enough to stand up and do the work to change it. I have not figured out how to strike that balance.

Changing the world is an impossible task. We will probably not succeed. But I, and we, must be angry enough about the injustice in the world to try to change it anyway.