Jim Kelter is not a violent man. He works hard at his accountant`s job, loves his wife and infant son and generally has ”a soft answer,” as the Proverb calls it, for all who come his way. At the moment, however, he is using grievous words loudly in a major New York department store, where a little plastic antishoplifting device, erroneously left on his merchandise, has just triggered an alarm that screams ”Thief!” at the top of its electronic lungs.
Swinging the shopping bag, Kelter slams it at the feet of an approaching security guard much as a running back spikes the football in the end zone after a touchdown.
”Pick it up!” he screams. ”You want to see what`s inside, you pick it up!”
The guard glowers, his own blood pressure beginning to rise. Kelter`s wife, Holly, intervenes at the very edge of bloodshed, opening the bag, showing sales receipts and the offending tag, which should have been removed at the cash register.
”It was the third time in a week they`d done that to me,” Kelter fumes. ”We`d been in line to the cash register forever, and when we got there, the clerk says, `I`m closed. Get in line for another register.` Then they leave this thing on the merchandise so everybody in the store thinks I`m stealing. I wasn`t going to open up the bag and show I`m not a crook just because they screwed up.”
Was he embarrassed by his tantrum?
”Not initially, but Holly was mortified,” he says with a rueful chuckle. ”It wasn`t the guard`s fault. He just happened to be the person who was in the way. An hour or two later, after we got home, I started feeling embarrassed. I felt that I`d acted like a child, but at the time, it was the only way to vent my frustration.”
PRESSURE COOKERS
There seem to be no ”soft answers” left in urban America. Wrath is the name of the game and, increasingly, those who dwell in metropolitan pressure cookers from New York to Los Angeles are playing it with perilous intensity.
In Miami, a 31-year-old New York woman turns 75 frustrated airline passengers into a screaming mob, then knees a cop in the groin when he tries to restrain her. The trigger: A four-hour delay in a flight to Newark-a flight that isn`t even hers.
In New York, a timid, introverted electronics technician turns into a raging gunslinger and shoots four black youths when they approach him on a subway train and ask for $5. His name: Bernhard Goetz, found guilty only of possessing an unregistered handgun. He still has a fan club.
In Los Angeles, for reasons never fathomed, the sprawling freeway system becomes a combat zone as motorists spend a long, hot summer shooting at one another. The toll, in 23 recorded skirmishes: 4 dead, 12 wounded.
There is, as yet, no such term as ”rageologist,” but given the academic predilection to study such things, it soon may come into the lexicon. Two experts who have probed deeply into the mechanics of unleashed rage have written books about it, and both agree that berserk behavior at the least provocation, more prevalent than it has been in nearly 100 years, is going to get worse before it gets better.
AN AGE OF RAGE
Once, when the routine of the average homo sapiens` day contained little more than the admonition ”Eat or be eaten,” the surge to rage was as essential to his survival as the unpolluted air he breathed. Confronted by danger, the ”flight or fight” syndrome came autonomically into play. Adrenaline started pumping, the heart rate doubled, blood vessels constricted and muscles tensed for action.
Today, millennia down the time stream, the autonomic machinery goes right on working, but, ironically, the danger now lies in the reaction rather than the cause. What is truly dangerous is to slug the boss, yell at a policeman or call large people names. Kicking the cat or exploding mindlessly in the anonymity of a traffic jam or the crush of a metropolitan manswarm is much safer. Indeed, according to Dr. Willard Gaylin, a psychiatrist who heads the Columbia College Hastings Center at Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., such violence often is the only recourse.
Gaylin, author of ”The Rage Within: Anger in Modern Life,” calls the autonomic rage response ”a biological mechanism gone bonkers . . . a cultural malfunction.”
”In preculture, anger was meant to attack the enemy . . . to pounce on whatever the enemy was,” he says. ”But the enemy today is more likely to fall out of an envelope than jump out of a bush. It`s often a letter: a dismissal notice, a `Dear John,` an eviction notice or a subpoena. What are you supposed to do, tear them apart with your teeth?”
A LITTLE RESPECT
Peter Stearns, who heads the history department at Carnegie-Mellon University and is co-author, with his psychologist wife, Carol Stearns, of
”Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America,” says the answer is to make anger respectable once more.
”We have seen increasingly successful efforts to contain expressions of discontent or anger in certain daily settings, so people really are on the lookout for opportunities to express emotion ordinarily denied them,” he says. ”One of the ways that looks relatively safe is to take this kind of thing out on strangers and seek anonymous settings in which you can let go.
”We need to encourage people to express discontent in moderate ways more regularly than we now encourage them to do. We need to make people feel they`re not necessarily crazy or bad workers if every so often they have to go in and bitch to the boss. As we become increasingly white-collar and managerial, we have an awful lot of people who do not have any way directly to express emotions that get stirred up in the course of their normal work life. They`re supposed to be nice to customers; they`re supposed to be nice to the boss; they`re supposed to be nice to subordinates-and all of this is very nice, but it takes an emotional toll that we need to re-examine.”
Stearns says it was not always thus. Once, around the turn of the century, anger and its expression were the mark of a man. Only weaklings were ”nice.”
”Eighty years ago, people-particularly men-were encouraged to see anger as an emotion that could be channeled, not repressed,” Stearns says. ”They were certainly taught that there were situations in which anger was inappropriate, but they weren`t taught that they were supposed to get rid of it altogether. Rather, they were encouraged to see anger as a legitimate force in competition, in protecting against injustice and in sticking up for the rights of the oppressed.
”We`ve largely dropped that now. We don`t have many outlets we regard as legitimate for expression of anger, jealousy and other emotions we view as largely unproductive. That`s why I think we`re seeing increasing incidents in which people try to use anonymous settings and interactions with strangers for some really boorish behavior.”
ANGRY LITTER
Gaylin, who warns that American society eventually will collapse into anarchy unless we root out the causes of spontaneous rage, disagrees with Stearns` contention that public discharge of anger should be made respectable once again.
”We do not care why you choose to spit on the floor any more than we are concerned about your reasons for being rude and insulting,” he writes. ”To vent your spleen in public is as much a form of public littering as if you chose to distribute your garbage there. You have no right to let it all hang out, since that `out` in which you are hanging it is ours as well as yours. Save both your anger and your contrition for areas in which they have validity. Decorum in the public spaces must be maintained.”
Still, even the most civilized, driven by forces over which they have no control, continue to ”let it all hang out” from time to time. Charles Howe, managing editor at McGraw-Hill World News in Manhattan, knows that all too well.
”As you matriculate upward in management, you learn to suppress anger,” he says. ”This isn`t terribly healthy because you`re bringing it home. You`re discharging it upon familiar people and frequently they`re people who have less power than you. I suspect the increase in child- and wife-beating is probably because urban life is much more stressful now that people have the wit to realize they simply can`t punch out the boss. Next to losing a spouse, I think losing a job is probably the most traumatic and stressful event in the world, so we are careful about this. We do the same thing stressed-out superiors do to us; we simply pass it down the chain of command.”
Howe recalls his own venture into the berserk. He was living in Los Angeles with his daughter shortly after the death of his wife when it happened, and he still is appalled by the loss of control.
He had come home exhausted from a trying day at the office. Retiring early, he told his daughter he was not, under any circumstances, to be disturbed. But then the phone rang and its authority, for the moment, overpowered his own.
”She woke me and told me someone was on the phone with whom I did not wish to speak-someone I had been gleefully avoiding,” Howe says. ”It was a very elaborate phone-answering-machine telephone, about a $250 model, and I ripped it out and smashed it to bits. I pulverized the thing, and I found the more I smashed it, the angrier I got. I was terribly embarrassed. I felt craven. Venting rage gives you very short-term gains, but very long-term problems because you`ve lost control. You`ve abdicated that cerebral part of you and you`re throwing a tantrum. The danger is, if you`re fairly big, you can throw fairly big tantrums.”
