Too often, activism is used as a means to justify hate, cloaked in a righteous context allowing us to diminish or belittle the “other” who hurt us. Pain that could bring us to our personal realization instead spills outward as outrage.
Outrage is the amphetamine of the masses; it keeps pumping us up but we get nothing done. It burns brightly but destroys, leaving the territory it covers too scorched for anything to grow. How often have we let our conditions justify our addiction to resentment? “You’d be resentful if you had gone through what I went through.” How often have we poured the gasoline of resentment on ourselves, lit ourselves on fire, and expected the other to perish from the smoke? And, when others were not outraged, considered them the enemy, a non-ally, and said something to the effect of, “If you are not also outraged, you are not conscious.”
And yes, there is a state of non-outrage that is merely denial. But outrage never penetrates that denial; it only fuels more internal rage and increases the denial because we are now seen as an irritant. We may get compliance but we will never get resolution. True resolution, the kind that gratifies, is only found in intimacy.
