Deal With Your COVID Anger
It’s a thing. Deal with it
Are you feeling the anger, the injustice, the outrage? Do you feel a sense of deep disappointment? Are you frustrated that important people, including our leaders, have let us down? Does it anger you that many have not shown our better sides, but instead have succumbed to, let’s just call it out, the contemptible? It is sad, and outrageous. And yes, it is worthy of grief.
And while that may be true, as well as the thought that many are more concerned with their individual happiness then the general good, it does not eclipse the other reality that many of us are trying to be helpful and neighborly. That truth doesn’t get in the news. The sad fact of life is that negative seems so much more powerful than good. Seems, not to be confused with Is. Anyone can attest to how their day can be just great until someone does something rude to them. Yes, there are some jerks out there sleeping on rolls of toilet paper and paper towels, but I believe there are many more who’d share their last roll with someone who needed it.
I respectfully challenge those I’ve heard who are angry and believe a “ridiculous optimism” is being preached. If anything, I hear more ridiculous doomsday-ism before people have acquired enough information, and that makes me crazy. I think some may be misinterpreting optimism for hope. It’s a valid point that Hope operates best recognizing the lay of the land. And the lay of the land is, yes, things are pretty awful in some areas of our country. And things will get worse there due to the population density in those areas, before they can get better. Yes. Ultimately they will get better, even with the sad fact of the 1% dying.
For some, perhaps they are just “platitudes”, but this is also true: while our world does have many evil, cowardly people who won’t rise to the occasion, it also has plenty of heroic individuals, and we (used to) rub shoulders with them daily. What is heroic? The heroic is the simple thing done at the right time, with no fanfare, no shouting “Look at me!” like a toddler. The heroic is the good and noble thing.
After the justified anger, I recommend, we seek to find the good and the noble among us. Chronic anger can enshroud our vision. Not that we won’t see life a little differently after this pandemic. We are wiser, and definitely different after this, but will we by cynical? The cynic is the disillusioned idealist, ever the angry one. The realist, however, is the one who doesn’t need those darned rosey glasses.
In my “neck of the woods,” Washington State, aka, the Initial Epicenter of the COVID-19, the heroes among us do the simple things. They stay at home and earn little to no income. They do the grocery shopping for those who are at risk. They drop off little presents or send letters to those isolated. Many of the heroes among us don’t get media coverage, but the effect of their actions is felt. Not at first. But eventually. Even as I am writing this, hundreds of ventilators sent to us from the federal stockpile, are being returned, because we don’t need them. We’ve Flattened the Curve. We’ve hunkered down and we’ve done it mostly without complaining, making lots of jokes, doing the simple thing.
All this to say: yes, be angry and recognize things are bad, but then use the energy from your anger to begin the change that is needed. There will always be something to be angry about in this world. After you work through your anger, look for what needs to be done, and what you can do to actualize that. How can you make the situation better in your small sphere? Then get on with it. Do it. Seek to do the good and honorable thing. Seek to recognize it in others. It’s out there. Open your eyes and get beyond your anger.
