There must be 50 ways: Participating in democracy #12: Get angry, put it to work

How can anger possibly fit within a conflict transformational approach to participating in democracy? Seeing anarchists throwing bricks through plate glass windows or shooting commercial-grade fireworks at police is not a productive nor transformational method.

However, strategic nonviolence is frequently fueled by anger. Even prayerful religionists committed by their faith to nonviolence are often motivated by anger (Hauerwas, 2020). Rosa Parks said she was motivated by her outrage at what racists did to Emmet Till, and indeed, that 14-year-old boy was murdered in Mississippi in August 1955 and by December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks sat down on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and refused to give up her seat for a white man.

Similarly, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about anger driving him and others to engage in robust, dangerous, bold nonviolent resistance. 

Mohandas Gandhi had the best metaphor, saying that anger was like steam--it could be held in until it exploded in destruction or it could be harnessed to do a great deal of positive work for freedom. 

If anger can move ignorant men and women to vote for Trump even as he gaslighted them endlessly, it also moved many to work against him. The anger exhibited by the insurance executive shooter, however, is exactly the wrong use of anger in a democracy. Rosa Parks and Dr. King got it right. But don't let anyone tell you that since you are angry you hurt democracy; that is demonstrably false when that anger can give you the spark to carry on with powerful nonviolent action.

References

Hauerwas, S. (2020). On God and Democracy: Engaging Bretherton’s Christ and the Common Life. Studies in Christian Ethics, 33(2), 235–242. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/10.1177/0953946819897173