Sacred Rage
Anger, properly channeled, is an important and powerful thing
Like many of you, I’ve spent the past few weeks alternating between feeling white hot rage and crying about the federal government attacks on immigrant communities and protesters here in the United States.
Each new headline is a battering ram: “Family tear gassed in their minivan.” “5-Year Old Child Seized.” “Renee Good Shot Dead.” And, on Saturday: “Alex Pretti, VA Nurse, Killed by Federal Agents.”
The entire Trump Administration is the shock doctrine in action. It is a campaign of shock and awe. It’s not just a legal and physical assault on democratic institutions, wilderness, environmental protections, privacy, societal norms, the gains of the Civil Rights and feminist movements, community activism, the left as a whole, and basic fucking decency. It is also a campaign of psychological warfare. It is meant to make us feel helpless, hopeless.
The lessons of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Gaza, and Fallujah are now being applied at home. This is the imperial boomerang.
Overwhelmed by emotions, I reached out to a friend and told her about my horror and desperation.
“It was always going to come to this.”
That’s what she told me, and it was the best possible thing she could have said, because it normalized my feelings.
It reminded me that the violence we’re now seeing on U.S. streets is nothing new. Look at the militarized response to the protests against racist police killings — public lynchings — in 2020. Look at what the United States government has fomented around the world, from Haiti to Iraq to Pakistan to Yemen to Gaza to Chile to Libya to Guatemala. Look at the violence that people live with around the world, from Mexico to Ecuador to Nigeria.
The relative peace and tranquility of supposedly “democratic” U.S. society has always been an illusion, a comforting fantasy, a shield only available to the privileged within this society and denied to the poor, to people of color, and especially to those living on the other side of American military guns.
We do not live in a peaceful time, nor do we live in a peaceful country.
As empires age, they become decrepit and dysfunctional, fall into squabbling tyranny, and lash out. As they destroy their ecological foundations, elites double down on the strategies which enabled them to accumulate wealth and power in the first place, trampling those who stand in their way, ignoring all the blaring warnings to change course. And, eventually, they fall.
It was always going to come to this.
This country has always been fascist. It has always been white supremacist. Even in times when reform and human rights have made advancements due to the tireless efforts of brave heroes won the day, an undercurrent of genocidal fervor has always remained latent in the American psyche, and especially in certain cultural elements.
Sacred rage
When my friend told me “it was always going to come to this,” I took a deep breath and I calmed down — not because the situation isn’t outrageous or because all of our anger, fear, and resistance isn’t justified. It is. But because none of this is surprising, if you’ve been paying attention, this is the trajectory that the country has been on for, well, at least my entire political life.
When we understand the situation, we can act. We can shed our paralysis and cynicism. Yes, it was always going to come to this. Yes, things are likely to get worse — probably far worse — before they get better. And yes, even in the midst of it all, there is much that we can do.
As my fear and panic faded, two feelings remained as strong as before: love, and anger. They dance together. They are partners, intertwined. Too often, we fear anger. We are used to perceiving anger as masculine, domineering, destructive. And it can certainly be those things. Like any emotion, anger can become an addiction. Like fear, happiness, or confusion, it can be abused.
Yet the anger that we see in our movements is, at its best, sacred. It is the anger of the mother bear defending her cubs. It is the anger of Kali, bringer of balance. It is the anger of people who know they have more to lose by collaborating than by resisting.
Anger, properly channeled, is a beautiful thing.
We’re seeing that anger on the streets on Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles. We’re seeing it in people cussing out ICE agents, giving voice to the words that must be said, and in the whistles that, at times, speak louder than words. We’re seeing it in the armed and unarmed security patrols which have sprung up in immigrant communities. We’re seeing it in the noise demonstrations, street blockades, direct actions. We’re seeing it in the 100,000 people striking and marching in sub-zero temperatures in Minneapolis on Friday.
Sacred rage is beautiful. It is powerful. It is part of us. It is human. It gives us strength and courage. It liberates us, at least in part, from fear. It enables us to act, and so to make our love manifest in the world. Nurture your sacred rage. Channel it. Learn from it.
In days and years to come, you will need it.
This is Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance. I’m author and organizer Max Wilbert. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication and the activism you see here, receive access to private posts, which contain behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.
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Before opening the email containing this post I left a Reddit thread on the question of whether Canadians would welcome some breakaway US states into their federation. Betteridge's Law remains intact, the idea was uniformly panned by Canadians. (I know, a thread topic is not a newspaper headline.) The objections of taking in any US state (other than Hawaii or the territory of Puerto Rico) were guns, private health care, American Exceptionalism, and just our sheer numbers.
As a person with mileage (age) I wholeheartedly agree with Max's friend. It was always coming to this. Coming from a cohort that was less than enthusiastic about dying to prevent the Domino Theory becoming reality sadly it was not shocking to see the weak hand waves over US foreign interference by military intervention. It was not shocking to see the evisceration of worker unions and the fulfillment of the Powell memo. The abandon of tuition-free state university education was part in parcel with our skin-in-the-game tug on those bootstraps culture.
So anger is justified. But too, life is a gift we should love and cherish. We can start by preserving space for life that is not human. For as long as I draw breath my support for acting in solidarity for justice and well-being will always exist.
I love what you say about anger and love, Max. It can be a delicate dance to learn with harsh consequences to missteps. So I want people to know about a training space called Rage Club because it is where I and others have and are learning still how to distinguish between the anger to evokes and perpetuates war and not use anger that way…while learning to use anger for regenerative acts. With more people learning this, I think that what would inevitably emerge is a new and regenerative culture. I see it happening already, including in you, Max. Thank you for all you do…and refuse to do.
https://rageclub.org/
Love, Nicole