Our Angry Generation

Gun control advocate David Hogg appears to have become the poster boy for an angry generation. According to Wikipedia, “while a senior at Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida, Hogg was on campus when the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old former student at the high school, started shooting with a semi-automatic rifle after pulling the fire alarm.”

Born a California native in 2000, Hogg is the son of a former agent of the FBI and a teacher for the Broward County Public Schools in Florida. He graduated in June after the shooting and turned his anger, not at the people who pull the triggers which kill school children, but at the gun rights of people who are legal, nonviolent owners of fire arms.

As I See It, there are few people exposed to such personal trauma who would NOT react when given a voice by the ever-present media. Hogg has become another pop-culture activist of whom artist and culture philosopher Andy Warhol predicted, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” (1968)

There are a number of adjectives used to describe this millennial generation. Watching all the political rage in the media coverage and commentary about protests and marches, ANGRY is certainly a fitting label. 

Generation Xers and Yers are angry about political winners and losers. They are distraught about the environment, non-vegans, abuse of women, human trafficking, the government, illegal alien rights, conservation of animals and trees.

What they don’t seem to be angry about are the rights of others who disagree. Civil disobedience, no matter it’s destructiveness of the innocent, is preferable to civil discourse. Many would fit right in with of the French Revolution mob rule which sent not only royalty but a host of personal enemies to the guillotine.

Whatever your values and convictions, there is someone on social media who believes you are wrong and unnatural. As I See It parenting today is a mine field. Fear of not being accepted by your peers is a powerful manipulator when trying to teach the future generation how to function in a society which harbors people from all walks of life.

Honesty is the casualty to social media bullying. Pushed to a frustration level, anger is the response, its lava burning all in its path. The children pick up this conflict response much faster than all the lessons on peaceful resolution.

Fear filled, angry parents are raising children in their own image.

When there is true injustice, anger is an appropriate response. Even the Bible endorses anger in a letter to the Christians at the church in Ephesus, “Be ye angry,.. “

However, the writer warns of its destructive potential; “…BUT sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath.” (Ephesians 4:26) Anger should be short term and never allowed to simmer.

Anger is the seed . . . and if allowed to take root, it bears a bitter, destructive fruit.  That is why an ancient sage warned against spending ANY time with volatile peers. “Do not make friends with a hot-tempered person,” he said, “do not associate with one easily angered, or you may learn their ways and get yourself ensnared.” (From the book of Proverbs 22:24-25)

The same sage apparently had personal experience with such hot-blooded people. “An angry person stirs up conflict, and a hot-tempered person abounds in many wrong doings. (Book of Proverbs 29:22)”

I certainly don’t have the secret to cooling the rage of this generation or the next we’re breeding in the caldron of hate. It’s a common emotional expression where the angered will not be satisfied until their will is forced upon the target of their vitriol.

It’s not political action or violent activism which will cool the fires of angry victims or protesters. Would it be a clique’ to say it will require the individual change of heart?  “Deceit is in the heart of them that imagine evil,” said the Sage (Proverbs 12:20), but “a good man shall be satisfied from himself. (Proverbs 14:14)” Then he was bold enough to proclaim, “Better a patient person than a warrior! (Proverbs 16:32)”
Cecil O’Dell Eads, who passed in 1993, has inscribed on his tombstone, “My brother was good at pissing people off.”

How do you want to be remembered?

How do you want your children remembered?

As I See It, ANGRY is a bad epitaph on any tombstone.