If politics sends you into a rage, is it really a good use of your time?

By David McElroy · June 30, 2012

I used to let myself get far too angry about far too many things, especially online. (This is the way I frequently felt.) Even when I was right, the angry way I acted often made me wrong. Even worse from my point of view, the rage I felt toward others was eating at me inside. I was hurting myself.

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about why I got so angry and looking into family issues that contributed. (One of my most vivid childhood memories is of the many times my father would be yelling at me so angrily that I’d watch the veins of his neck swell as he yelled.) I had to retrain myself in a number of ways and change some of my ways of thinking — or at least learn how to manage what I was feeling instead of being destructive.

I still get angry with idiots — and sometimes with non-idiots who just rub me the wrong way — but I’m able to remind myself about my priorities and ask whether anger does any good. It’s very rare that I let myself get as angry and combative as I used to.

I’m happier with myself and I think other people are happier with me.

I thought about this a lot over the past couple of days as I watched the collective rage of many people over the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision spill over onto Facebook. Some people were calm. Some people were angry, but measured. And others were raging angry, unable to talk about it without screaming in the virtual sense.

I can’t tell other people what to do. I might not even be able to tell them what’s good for them. But as I watched the rage, I couldn’t help but feel that some of the angry people were hurting themselves — and not doing anything that had any chance of changing anything. I found myself thinking that we all reach a point at which our anger has become like an acid eating away at the inside first.

I get very angry with the authority that the state asserts over me and the things that it does to control me at times. But I’ve learned that the anger doesn’t change anything, and the anger was diverting me from things that could be productive and had a chance to make me happy. I can’t explain how I got to that point, but it’s made all the difference in the world.

One thing that makes it easier for me not to get so angry is that I’ve become realistic about what’s possible and what’s not. If I had high expectations about changing government, I would get much more angry, because I would be constantly disappointed. As it is, though, I understand not to expect much of anything, because that’s what I’m going to get. I frequently quote a line from a very old Steve Taylor song (out of its original context) that says a lot about the way I feel: “Since I gave up hope, I feel a lot better.”

When you feel angry and start finding people on Facebook or somewhere else to yell at — actually or virtually — you’re not doing yourself any good and you’re not changing other people’s opinions. As my friend Chris Hansen said on Facebook Friday afternoon:

“I’m going to change my strongly held beliefs because of what you just wrote on Facebook,” said no one ever.

He’s right. Your angry rants aren’t changing the minds of the people who disagree with you. Your well-reasoned arguments aren’t changing many minds, either. People don’t want to change. They’re just as convinced that you’re wrong as you’re convinced that they’re wrong.

Is being angry about politics worth as much as you’re putting into it at times? Is it worth what it’s doing to the stress on your body? Is it worth what it does to the ways that you end up treating people as a result?

I can’t answer those questions for you, but I can tell you that my life is much better since I don’t let myself get angry and act it out in this way. If you find yourself feeling angrier than you’d like — and you realize that it’s not doing yourself or anybody any good — you might want to find some strategies for backing away from the things that make you angry.

You won’t change the political world this way, but let’s be honest: You’re not changing the political world now. The best part is that you might enjoy life more. It worked for me.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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