One frustrating thing about Limbaugh (and Jones and Hannity, et al) is that they made Being Angry a Right Wing Thing.
Extremely frustrating when you see a genocide in Gaza or global temperatures spiking or some cop shoot up a subway over a $3 fare, express anger, and have someone respond “You just sound like Rush Limbaugh”.
There are real reasons to feel righteous anger and to use that as motivation to act. But guys like Rush just fill the airways with this white nationalist noise. They make the idea of being angry this exclusive Right Wing attitude to have.
The problem is that you can be angry all day and it won’t accomplish anything without coordinated, planned, collective action. And collective action is made more difficult with angry people.
Anger motivates you to act Right Now, which is why it’s good for reactionaries. They want you either impotently angry so you can’t think clearly to make those long term, organized plans; or they want you mad enough to go do a little stochastic terrorism.
Progressives have a lot of trouble hitting the slow-burn simmer of anger in a way that’s motivational and doesn’t slip into despair when you get tired from all that rage that you can’t turn into immediate results.
The problem is that you can be angry all day and it won’t accomplish anything without coordinated, planned, collective action. And collective action is made more difficult with angry people.
I disagree. People who aren’t agitated make for poor partners. They’re unreliable, uncommitted, and easily wooed by empty platitudes from the folks committing the offenses.
Anger motivates you to act Right Now, which is why it’s good for reactionaries.
Generic always-on anger burns you out and turns you into a cynic. It’s the cynicism that reactionaries feed on. But when you have a baseline moral position and you can recognize what does and does not rise to the level of offense, you can leverage outrage productively rather than feel sour and hateful all the time.
Progressives have a lot of trouble hitting the slow-burn simmer of anger in a way that’s motivational and doesn’t slip into despair when you get tired from all that rage that you can’t turn into immediate results.
Progressives (in the US) have a hard time mobilizing large groups toward productive action because they lack the resources and the institutional structure to mobilize individual activists into a collective workforce. When progressives get access to these kinds of resources, they generate enormous social value in a relatively short amount of time. The despair we routinely see in progressive communities stems from groups that are fractured - often deliberately so - and undermined by state and corporate institutions.
We need to get better at doing things about it instead of farting rage into the Internet.
That is frustrating. I would counter those people that being passionate is not the same thing as extremist media personalities that literally profit off outrage. It’s okay to hear and react to things, but we shouldn’t all be open fucking sores that flip out over literally every single thing we encounter like an autistic toddler: all emotion, no perspective, can’t be reasoned with, etc. That’s the Republican Outage Machine…
we shouldn’t all be open fucking sores that flip out over literally every single thing we encounter like an autistic toddler: all emotion, no perspective
What happens when I live in a country where more perspective just means witnessing more atrocities?
Do you have an example where “more perspective just means witnessing more atrocities”? I think you’re thinking of “awareness”.
There’s definitely an argument for limiting "doom and gloom news for ones own mental health…
