Secondary

 Anger is a secondary emotion. This is a little tidbit I gleaned from reading social emotional education materials for a couple of decades. I have brought this up from time to time, suggesting that the thing that shows up in our lizard brains most often is not anger or hate. 

It's fear. 

For example, I am pretty comfortable at this point saying that my anger at the previous "president" was rooted in my fear of him. What he represented and the potential I saw in his words and deeds for harm to the country in which I live. And myself. I worried for five years about all the ways that the direction he was steering the ship of state was dangerous. A planet at the tipping point with climate change and an economy that threatened to squeeze even more wealth to the top of the tube and a wave of white supremacy not only running amuck but cheered on. 

I was afraid.

That turned into anger. I felt once again like that turtle near the bottom of the stack built by Yertle. That's a Dr. Seuss reference. It's from the book he wrote to teach kids about the evils of fascism. I would love to tell you that all the burps I made helped topple the teetering tower of turtles, laying our Yertle low, where he is now the king of the mud, for that is all that he can see. I wan to believe that by continuing to raise my voice, in fear and then anger, that I helped take the strain off our collective backs. 

Some of us burp when we get scared. Or hiccup. If we get uncomfortable enough, we might even cry out. Where the fear is the greatest, expect the dyspepsia is greatest, expect the belches to be loudest. In communities of color. In neighborhoods hit hardest by the pandemic. All the places that relief is so desperately needed. 

Yes, I am aware of the squawking on the other side as well. The cry of the privileged white is being heard far and wide, and though they sound angry, we know. They're scared. As Patton Oswalt pointed out a few years back, "White people, we used to be in charge of, like, 99.9 percent of shit. And in the recent years, that number has plummeted to 96.4 percent." Which is why you hear a lot of belching and barfing from those gated communities where fear gets stored up like an alien power source that powers Fox News. And when all that indigestion hits Tucker Carlson in a wave, he just starts babbling uncontrollably. Somewhere in that pointed little head of his, I am sure Tuck is terrified of some brown person sneaking in the dead of night to steal his job. 

With all this fear hanging over the country like a lingering winter storm, the chances that spring will come and all of this will disappear seems a bit unlikely. Until the calming winds of understanding blow through, expect a lot more anger.