The Virtues of Venting

Sometimes it’s good to get angry. We get so enured to the constant barrage of disturbing news – personal, local and global – that we become indifferent. And the petty indignities that we suffer build up and we don’t even notice because, “that’s just the way things are”. But the awareness of it all gets under our collective skins and sometimes, like a boiler that reaches its failing point, something’s got to give.

I’m not saying we should all fly off the handle at every perceived slight, but sometimes it’s better not to turn the other cheek. Like that scene in Network, where Peter Finch implores his viewers to go to their windows and scream into the streets, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” A good outburst like that can be cathartic.

What’s the point? As a writer, I always am looking for motive. I want to understand why people do the things they do. But, if I do say so, I’m a pretty level headed guy. I know how to keep my emotions in check. When I was younger I spent a night in jail because I didn’t know when to shut my big mouth, and I got in other kinds of trouble more than a few times mouthing off. So I’ve mellowed. But the problem is that now I usually give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I always assume that they’re operating from genuine good motives. I have a hard time believing the worst of anyone.

That makes it hard to create good villains. If you’re always looking for the best in everyone, you tend to make apologies for their behavior. I rarely get down to cases and call people out for what they do.

The simple fact is that life is full of good and bad. Usually the bad’s not something big and horrible like The Holocaust or John Wayne Gacey. More often bad comes in small packages, like a betrayal or deceit. Sometimes it’s simply caustic ennui. In this life you realize that, sooner or later, everyone will let you down, even the people that you trust the most. And beyond that there are just really rotten people in the world; people who don’t give a shit about anything but themselves, people who would rather lie than tell the truth, people who will say one thing and do the other. Rather than just taking that all in stride, sometimes it’s good to get good and pissed off about it.

It’s those people, the casually indifferent, that I’m trying to understand, not the really Evil People. I do believe that evil exists, and that sometimes it’s heredity rather than environment, that some people are simply born under a bad sign and that they’re “fated” to act out in terrible ways. It happens.

What I’m more interested in are the casual acts of indifference and cruelty. Like the people who can watch while a person is mugged on the street outside their window and do nothing about it. Or like the Wal-mart shoppers the other day that trampled over the worker at the store on Long Island. Reportedly after the death of the young man was announced, and shoppers were told to clear the premises, they refused, shouting that they had been on line waiting to get in so they weren’t going anywhere.

Is that crazy or what?

I’m not trying to throw a damper on the joys of this holiday season. I spent Thanksgiving with my family in Sarasota; my brother in law and I fished on the beach, we all ate ourselves silly and watched the kids play and everyone we met was uniformly nice and full of the good energy of the day.

But still that specter of those Long Island shoppers haunts me. That’s what got me started on this whole thing. I assume that if you took all of them on an individual basis, you’d find the stampeders to be decent folk, certainly not murderers. But they were so concerned that they be the first to be in line to buy a big screen TV or a Wii that they killed a man to make that happen. The report says that when the EMT’s arrived they had to fend off the crowd as they attempted to perform CPR on the victim or the EMT’s would have been trampled too.

That’s evil, even if it’s not with a capital E. And what those people were thinking, feeling the bodies underneath their feet, keeping on toward the shelves while a man lie dying, is what gets my attention. Those people who were there are going to be sitting around the house on Christmas Day, playing with their new toys. What are they going to feel? Will any of them go out and, say, work at a soup kitchen or go to church because of what took place? Or are they going to simply shrug it off and say it wasn’t their fault; that the guy was an idiot for being where he was, or Wal-Mart should have had better policies about crowd control or something like that?

I wonder. Because I have a feeling that the great majority of those people are going to respond in a way that’s more geared toward apathy than apology. That gives me something to think about when I’m thinking about character. It’s a very expensive insight into how the world works and it makes me mad as hell. I’ll use it and I’ll write about it, but other than that, there’s not a lot I can do. I guess I just have to take it.

— Ric Hess, Dec 1, 02:24 PM

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