May I Suggest...47 Ways Forward

Strategies for navigating the next four years

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May I suggest …

The above phrase filled the subject line of a recently received email from one of my favorite people. The brief letter that followed read:

… something on Anger. This I struggle with, hourly. Just a thought.

I couldn’t respond fast enough, typing: Yes, will do.

But now it’s been several days over a week two almost three weeks. I’ve tried attempted so fucking many numerous posts as I have tried and tried struggled to find the right worthy adequate words.

Arrrrrgggghh!!!!

My anger is being increased by my anger at not being able to write [adequately] about anger!

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Let me try again.

This past Monday would have been my father’s 100^th birthday. He lived a long, full life, and made it two days shy of his 89^th birthday. The Rev. Robert B. Hedges was a larger-than-life, much loved (and in need of much love), giant hug of a guy. Over his 58 year ministry, my dad baptized, married, buried, and helped thousands of people. He was a perpetual Hope seeker. A connoisseur of the Bright Side. I used to joke that if my dad had to, say, have his feet amputated, he’d wake from surgery, turn on his 1,000 watt smile and say, “Well, now I don’t have to buy shoes anymore.”

I am grateful for the many gifts my dad gave me. However, being adept and agile with anger was not one of them.

To say that my dad had a temper would be an understatement. It was unsettling those times he would rage, especially with him being a religious man who wore a white clerical collar. Part of why his volcanic tendencies were particularly pronounced, I believe, was due to his immense desire to not be angry. He wanted to feel anything but. He would do his best to summon his contagious positivity and his good humor to beat back the daily build-up of single dad disappointments and frustrations. But since he was wholly human and perpetually overwhelmed, Anger would sometimes get the better of him.

This may be some of why I came to believe that Anger - as a rule - is Ugly, and Harmful, and to be Avoided at All Costs.

What has become clear since the inauguration, at 62 years of age, I remain highly unskilled when it comes to Anger.

And I better get better at it fast.

Because lately, like lots of people right now, I’m angry all the time.

I’m wrestling with whether to list the myriad of reasons why - the daily, sometimes hourly, Trumpian/Muskian audacities/illegalities – the WTFs - the Can You Believe He/They Just Said/Did Fill-In-The-Blank-nesses. Then came this past Friday. The frightening culmination of a month-long of jaw-dropping fuckery as it played out in the Oval Office. In what was either an orchestrated attempt or just a straight-up malevolent display of incompetence – our old/new forever felonious President and his frat boy cronies did their best to humiliate a war-time hero-leader of an allied country. You haven’t said thank you. It reminded me of sixth-grade thuggery. If only the stakes and consequences were of a sixth-grade level. Why don’t you wear a suit? Seriously?

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Here is an imperfect list of some of my current, still-evolving thoughts on Anger:

There are only two ways (for me) to be free from anger at this perilous moment in time – 1.) Be dead. 2.) Be in so much denial that I may as well be dead. (Neither option is particularly appealing at this time.)

Anger will grow the more I try to avoid it.

Not All Anger is Equal.

Too Much Anger is preferable to Not Enough Anger.

However, acting vengefully - in an effort to punish adversaries/enemies - is not the answer. [See the Trump/Musk regime for daily, if not hourly, evidence.]

Anger can be an asset. It can help clarify what matters most.

Anger isn’t a destination. A place to stay long. It’s a bridge. Keep going, get to the other side, which is Action.

Try not to“act out” of anger. But let [appropriate] anger inform my actions.

Going forward, gone are the days (I hope) where misplaced keys or a new hole in an old sock would set me off. No big deal. That you didn’t return my phone call, not worth my anger. You avoid me in the supermarket. Not a problem. You and your Tesla cut me off me and my RAV4 hybrid while trying to enter the HOV lane. Bless you. Have a nice, safe day.

A childhood friend recently mentioned the concept of Righteous Anger. Which is Anger for what truly matters. Injustice. Needless cruelty. Inept, malicious bad “actors” dismantling systems and institutions they neither understand nor have the ability to put back together.

If I could get to that, then I would be on my way to becoming an Anger Artist. An Alchemist of Outrage.

Alchemist? As in Alchemize. That’s a banger of a word. It’s active, transformative. It’s got teeth. Which leads me to the next of my 47 Ways Forward.

#9 Alchemize Anger into Action

And while I may not know yet every action I will take, I do have a secret hope for what those I will leave behind might one day say about me.

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In a Long Island cemetery during the summer of 2001, just weeks before 9/11, I saw my most favorite epitaph ever. A husband and wife, with matching headstones, were buried next to each other. They had died long ago, but the marble was still shiny and the chiseled words easy-to-read. The father had a lengthy paragraph that described him in King James-ish type prose. Something to the effect of He hath been the greatest father in all-eth of time. His love knoweth no boundaries. And so on. I remember thinking, He must have been one of those amazing dads - the Dad of dads. But it wasn’t his epitaph that stuck. The effusive hyperbolic-ness of the husband’s headstone was no match for the six words that memorialized his wife:

She hath done all she could.

I remember gasping at first when I read those words. That’s it? That’s all you can say about dear old Mom?

But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized … No, that’s it. That’s everything.

She did all she could.

When the history of this particular fraught and unsettled era is written, let’s hope the same can be said about those of us fighting to save our Democratic Republic – We gave it all we had. We did all we could.

Ah, another way forward:

#10 Do All We Can

This is the last photo taken of my dad and me. Six weeks before he died, he found the strength to put on his vestments one final time and give a stunning funeral homily for his best friend.

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Late in life the Rev. Robert B. Hedges became a kinder, gentler version of himself. And for those rare times he got mad, he usually had good reason. So in his own way, he became an Anger Artist.

A day or so before he left us - his last good day, my now bone-thin dad was being visited by the hospice nurse. He asked my sister Mary Clare and I to leave the two of them alone for a while. So we left the room, thinking we’d be called back soon. Apparently we were not needed. Finally, we couldn’t stand it any longer, so we went to check on our dad. It was a jarring sight. My father, strong in spirit but weak in every other way, lovingly holding the hand of the hospice nurse who was in tears. I asked, “What’s going on?” The nurse said, between sobs, “Your father is counseling me.”

There he was - in his last hours of coherency - a day or so before he would die - helping. Even as he was dying, he found a way to do something to help someone, modeling for me that it’s never too late to do all we can.