Kimberly Steele

Our culture knows a thing or two about wrath. One look at what used to make a popular movie before COVID and its army of Karens cancelled moviegoing (and by cancelling moviegoing, by accident cancelled Hollywood and its celebrities) reveals our wrathfulness in nearly every scene. From solitary zombie-slayers to Dexter to chiseled superheroes named "the Avengers", we Americans are a people with a chip on our collective shoulder and many axes to grind. You would think a nation of such decadent wealth and pandemic obesity would spend more time being grateful than engineering vendettas, but alas, the formerly mentioned virtues are more noble than the ones we choose to indulge.

Wrath Begets Wrath

Wrath is the idea of avenging one wrong while piling on others as if they were five cents a piece in the bargain bin of impingements at a grievance fire sale. Wrath is the child of frustration. Frustration arises when the world is primarily perceived as a sick, unjust, disgusting, unfair place, devoid of gods and therefore devoid of punishments for acting in a demonic fashion. Wrath happens when the frustrated take on the mantle of a god and smite perceived pathetic sinners "so things don't keep getting worse". Though Hollywood movies are fond of depicting wrath as a solo endeavor, meted out by heroic men and women in tights upon cardboard baddies, wrath's most common form is that of genocide. Wrath is amorphous. Wrath is fine with "almost", which usually only counts in the case of games of horseshoes and the lobbing of hand grenades.

The problem with wrath is that it is the function of a grandiose ego. The wrathful perceive the world as spun out of control. They conclude that they are the only ones able to control it. People with big egos are naturally wrathful because they feel entitled. There's always one group to be conveniently blamed: women who get abortions, blacks, whites, Muslims, Asians, Jews.

Team Anti-Human

Let's use the example of a particularly wrathful group: the childfree vegan antinatalists. I know many of them and you would be surprised what great people most of them are. Nevertheless, they labor under the notion that any decision to create more humans on a planet of shrinking resources is vile and immoral. They are equal-opportunity haters. A good faction of them hate themselves for being human and see humans as a scourge of the planet whom the Earth would be better off without. They mistakenly aggrandize the animal kingdom, conveniently overlooking and excusing egregious cruelty in non-human animals. For instance, did you know that bedbugs engage in homosexual rape, and because of the phenomenon of sperm-hijacking, a male bedbug can force another male bedbug to carry a pregnancy to term? Bedbugs are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to animal's injustice to other animals. Humans' noble cousins, the chimpanzees, invented the concept of raiding a neighbor's village, stealing their stuff, and enslaving the survivors. They did this long before proto-humans emerged from the trees.

Wrath is pointless. All it does is create more wrath.

Enablement

The opposite of wrath is enablement, and true to form of any deadly sin, it is just as bad as wrath. To enable the wrathful and to let them get away with murder is to become a sheeple who turns the other cheek until that cheek is a bloody hole. Take the bad parent who refuses to set limits for their child. A shrieking, hitting, spitting tantrum from the child earns toys and supplication. Never does the screaming hellion earn consequences for their actions. I'm not saying that children should be corporeally punished -- I am not a parent in this incarnation and I can't be the judge of parents -- however, those who gave into their child's tantrums from the approximate era of 1980 - 2000 created the insufferable Millennials who are rioting as we speak in the burnt out business districts of Portland, Oregon.

The term enablement is bandied about in addiction circles. Nobody leans into a beating more deftly than the circle of non-addicts who enable an addicted loved one. The worst outcome is when the addict's creeping foulness draws the naive and innocent into dependency because misery loves company.

When an opposing force is put in place, such as a child's bad behavior, it is more often than not a lesson we are being taught in order to strengthen the good we have inside. That's what I think, anyway. Giving up and letting the evil roll over you means you've failed and will have to learn the lesson an even harder setting. Retreating in milquetoast martyrdom does not make the lesson go away. In my own past, I stayed with boyfriends I didn't want instead of being "cruel to be kind". As reward for my cowardice, I spent many years in abject misery, never understanding the keys to freedom were in my hands.

Patience

Nothing in our Meat World is infinite, especially not patience. However, there's a case to be made for patience, a.k.a. the process of withholding judgement until all sides have been considered and if they cannot be considered by such small minds as ours, to leave judgement up to the superior intelligences known as gods. On a personal level, a really great counselor once guided me to think about my own "dealbreakers". Meaning, the things that I could not tolerate in a human acquaintance. One of my dealbreakers is racism, and I am not talking about the manufactured racism of Black Lives Matter which is actually a piecemeal, shoddy disguise for embittered, intellectually lazy bigotry against white people. I am talking about the racism that drove an ex-friend of mine to shun the idea of adopting a baby outside of her own particular race, because she was convinced she wasn't capable of loving a kid of a different color than her own. In other words, cutting her out of my life was for the best because just as she is limited in her racism, my limits prevent me from being friends with someone who genuinely thinks that her ethnicity makes her better than someone with a different ethnicity. I hate my ex-friend and I hate BLM for the same reason: they're racists through and through. I'm not going to fight them and I don't want revenge on them. I knowI acknowledge their existence and I stay the heck out of their way.

Patience means putting up a fight when users and abusers would rather steamroll you. Patience also means refraining from throwing your anger at them so it doesn't create an endless loop of retribution. My morality and my ethics are my business and your morality and ethics are yours. Patience is what is needed to figure out which one of us is actually right, and it is highly likely that only gods know the answer to that question.