I get to be angry.
So do you.
There is nothing inherently wrong with anger, no matter how much the hippy dippy new-age-y types will tell you there is.
We feel anger for a reason.
If you let it rule your life to the exclusion of all else, it can be destructive. If you turn it against yourself or other people who don’t deserve it, that’s not ok.
But you know what? Me saying that occasionally someone makes me want to stab them, is not anything to freak out about. Me saying that someone should “Die in fire!” is not anything to freak out about.
Now, if I have a knife in my hand and I start toward you very menacingly and say, “I want to stab you” then you might have reason to worry. If I’m standing in line for coffee, chatting with the barista, and sigh, “Sometimes I just want to stab him,” this is not cause to gasp in shock and dismay.
Seriously. I’m sorry me disgust with someone’s behavior offended the tiny bubble of peace and tranquility in which you live, but out here sometimes people get pissed off. About a lot of things. About inequities and assholes getting away with horrible shit, and people who suck, and people who won’t listen to you but instead just dismiss everything you say because “You’re just one of those angry Feminists/Queers/ethnicity of choice.”
Fuck yeah, I’m angry. And you would be, too, if you paid any god damned attention to what’s going on around you.
Ghandi, father of peaceful resistance… You don’t think he was angry? If he wasn’t angry, then why the fuck was he leading protests?
GAH!
Polimicks 
That’s one of the discussions Raven and I have had – that it’s OK and actually very healthy to be angry for a time – so long as I don’t hold on to it over long. Usually, I’ll get short bursts of white hot anger at people – and then it’s over and done with. The more I try to bury the anger the worse it gets. Eventually it comes out one way or another. It’s best to just let it out right away and then let it go. Even when I’m really angry it’s usually gone within a few hours or a day at most…
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I have no problem with people expressing their anger appropriately. Including me wishing out loud that idiots with extremely loud cars lose their hearing by the time they’re forty.
For some reason though, the curse “die in a fire” really strikes me uncomfortably. I don’t use it and I hope I never piss someone off enough for them to damn me like that.
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yup. we do get to be angry. And it is better to get it out than let it fester in your soul, where it can do *real* damage.
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Anger has at times been for me an incredibly cleansing, motivating, positive emotion. Of course the trick is to keep it in that realm.
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