The Role Of Anger In The Social Movement

When standing up for a social issue, it’s impossible to leave emotions at the doorstep. Emotions and moral situations like anger, fear, despair, burnout and co-optation are key tools in fueling social movement (Pyle, 2014, p. 24). Anger is especially important as it is particularly linked to the other emotions and “stems from the witnessing of suffering” (Pyle, 2014, p. 24), which is a common sight in community organizing. However, we all know anger can have a mind of its own and spawn some ugly situations, so what happens when anger gets out of hand? Are there times when anger impedes social movement? And if it does, how can we help anger stay a socket wrench rather than a wrecking ball in terms of social change? Anger is undoubtedly a necessary part of organizing. It is a natural reaction in the face of adversity, and is “useful because it stems from acknowledgement of injustice and propels …show more content…
Where do we start? Both research and reason say it starts with us as individual people. In order to keep anger a tool to construct a cause, we can’t let it consume us on a personal level. Though we need to care about the causes we believe in and fight for, “we need to go beyond the brittle self-centeredness of anger” and never forget “our fuller humanity and underlying potential of goodness” (Tricycle, 2012). We must remember that at their core people are good, and more importantly they are fighting for their cause just like we are, whether it’s different from our views or not. Rather than use anger against each other, we need to be better at understanding one another, and wield anger against “patterns of greed, prejudice, hatred, fear, and self-protectiveness that have been operative” in our society (Tricycle, 2012). Anger is a fire that can fuel and forge change, and as organizers of social change we must remember its power so it stays a torch rather than a