Editors’ Letter: Being angry is the key to change

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] think the number one thing people need in their lives is anger.

I’m not saying we have to go through life literally blind with rage, attacking random people on the street and enthusiastically biting things, that’s just stupid. I’m saying that if we never get angry, if we don’t see things and go: “What in fuck’s name is going on here?”, then we will never have the impetus to get up and change it.

There’s this myth that love is what makes things change, that if you love someone or a group of someones, that’s enough to make them realise the error of their ways. But love has never given us liberation. Love doesn’t make us get up and go “Excuse me, this is bullshit and I would like you to change it.”

That’s not to say love and anger are mutually exclusive. I’m sure you’ve simultaneously loved someone and wanted to punch them in the face. Love isn’t what makes things happen though it’s a passive force and, however powerful it may be, it won’t make people stop in their tracks and really start seeing what happens around them.

I’m sure you’ve simultaneously loved someone and wanted to punch them in the face.

That’s anger’s job. No one will listen to anything that isn’t forceful, no one will listen to anything that doesn’t take no for an answer. We can’t stand back and accept what goes on around us with a tut and a “well isn’t that a shame.” The appropriate reaction to reading about a hate crime or something similar is “this is disgusting, this is angering”. Because when we have that, when we know that something is wrong, like a society where a hate crime can be reported and all the underlying structures that foster that hatred ignored, it can give us the will to make people aware of it.

Anger is active. It makes us try to spread as much information to as many people as possible. It makes us get on a bus to London with thousands of other students to demonstrate for free education. It makes us volunteer to give help with school subjects for kids who don’t get help at school. At the less useful end of the scale, it makes us write short articles to get other people angry too.

In Ferguson, MO, USA, people are still protesting against the institutionalised racism that lead to the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenage boy. The policeman who shot him, Darren Wilson, is still free and on paid leave. We can make people aware of that racism, and we can look at our own society in Britain and make people aware that we’re not much better. If we have the money, we can even donate to the people who are trying to provide food for some of the kids in Ferguson who don’t have access to it.