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NAMA Newsletter MAY 2019 __________________________________The Real Roots of American Rage (4 Part series, Part 4) -The untold story of how anger became the dominant emotion in ourpolitics and personal lives-and what we can do about it.

The Revenge ImpulseIN THE FALL OF 2018, Larry Cagle, an Englishteacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, became so furious thathe started plotting to throw his school into chaos.Schools had lost more than $300 million in statefunding over the past decade. Cagle taught atEdison Prep, one of Tulsa's best public schools, buteven there, instructors were sometimes preventedfrom turning on the heat in the winter or airconditioners in the summer.Teachers in other cities said they didn't haveenough textbooks or taught in buildings infestedwith rats. Many of Oklahoma's schools, to savemoney, were open only four days a week. "Mytake-home check is $1,980 a month," Cagletold me. In Florida, where he taught previously, itwas almost twice that amount. "I have three kids incollege. I'm driving a car that's 14 years old andhas 200,000 miles and a broken windshield that Ican't afford to replace. We can't live like this."Cagle had been so angry at the school system forso long that his wife had instituted a rule: Noranting at the dinner table. Eventually, he decidedhe needed to do something. He emailed a fewcolleagues and asked, What if everyone called insick on the same day? "All it would take was sixteachers, and if we all called in during the middle ofthe night, there's no way the district would be ableto find enough substitutes," Cagle recalled. "Itwould cause total havoc."The idea of causing such a disruption would haveonce seemed abhorrent to Cagle. But his faith inthe institutions he normally relied on-Edison

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the institutions he normally relied on EdisonPrep's administration, the school board, electedofficials-had been shaken. He had complained topeople in power, had volunteered on school-boardcampaigns, had filed grievances with his union, hadtried to explain to parents why they oughtto demand more for their kids. None of it hadworked.So Cagle persuaded five colleagues to call in sickone night and, just as he'd surmised, the schoolwent into crisis, with classes canceled and theprincipal's office deluged with phone calls fromparents asking why their child had spent the entireday in the gym. Cagle began recruiting teachers atother schools. He'd read that terrorists organizedthemselves into cells. "People were really scaredthey were going to get fired," he said. "So I'd tellthem, 'Don't give me the names of the people inyour cell. Just make it happen.' Then we had 50teachers call out sick one day, and I called one ofthe television-news stations and I said, 'Let me tellyou why these teachers are so pissed off.' "After the story aired, Cagle began receiving emailsand messages on social media first dozens, thenhundreds-from educators all around the state. Atthe time, newspapers were filled with stories ofteachers walking out of classrooms in West Virginia,demanding higher pay and more resources.Kentucky and Colorado were also headed towardteacher strikes. In Oklahoma, oil workers beganstaging their own "sick-outs," and the governor,concerned about a contagion effect, pushed througha pay raise for educators-an average of $6,100 perteacher. But the bill included only limited funds toimprove the schools.The teachers were far from mollified. They decidedto hold a massive, statewide walkout. Aftercoordinating via email, text message, Facebook,and Twitter, thousands of teachers across the stateleft their classrooms on Monday, April 2, 2018.Principals were forced to close hundreds of schools.Parents had to hire babysitters or stay at home.The striking teachers initially didn't have much ofa plan; they hardly had a set of coherent demands.They were just fed up and anted everyone to knowit. On the first morning of the protest, a fewthousand teachers descended on the state capitol inOklahoma City. Television cameras showed up, andpeople began posting photos online. The strikestretched through the rest of the week, and theninto the next. As many as 80,000 people attendedthe demonstrations. "It's like a volcano, you know?"Cagle told me. "There's only so much pressure thatbuilds up and then everything blows."Cagle's wife and daughter-who had just been hiredby one of the school-board members he wasattacking in the press-begged him to stop marchingand giving interviews. "I was having a lot ofarguments at home," Cagle told me. "I wantedto stop, but I couldn't stop feeling so angry all thetime." Cagle would try to think about somethingelse, but his mind would return, almost unbidden,to his grievances. "I knew it was hurting myfamily," Cagle said, "but all I could think about waspunishing the people who had made me angry forso long."RESEARCHERS CALL THE phenomenon in whichanger rather than making things better becomes a

anger, rather than making things better, becomes acycle of recrimination, rumination, and everexpanding fury the revenge impulse.Though anger and the desire for revenge can feelintertwined, they are two distinct emotions. Simplybecoming angry doesn't prompt a revenge impulse.Thomas Tripp, a professor at Washington StateUniversity who has studied how revenge can affectthe workplace, told me that revenge is much morecommon if there is "a sense that the fairness ofinstitutions, what we call procedural justice, hasbroken down." When people believe that socialinstitutions are functioning, they're much less likelyto feel vengeful urges. One study, for instance,found that when laid-off workers believed firingswere handled fairly-that a process was adhered to,that seniority was respected, that workerevaluations were properly considered-they wereless likely to protest or complain, even if theydisagreed with the outcome.Alternately, if workers believed that managers wereplaying favorites or manipulating the rule book,sabotage was more likely. "Think about presidentialelections," Tripp said. "Every four years, roughlyhalf the nation is deeply disappointed.So why don't they get out their pitchforks? Becauseas long as they believe it was a fair fight, theytolerate losing. But when both the process and theoutcome seem unfair, that's when we see riots."It makes a certain evolutionary sense that thedesire for revenge would be coded into us as anemotion of last resort. Good anger, as James Averilldemonstrated, encourages us to air our grievancesand find solutions. A leader like Cesar Chavez canreframe anger as moral indignation, which canextend the power of personal grievances into aninstrument for the pursuit of a more just world. Butwhen we come to believe that justice is impossible,we get the desire for revenge. We no longer expectour anger to be heard; we don't express ourselveswith the hope of finding accommodation. Rather,some people become willing to do anythingto advance their interests, regardless of who isstanding in the way. "When we want revenge, wekeep going until we feel like we've taught the otherperson a lesson,"Tripp said. "The goal is to hurt the other person." Italso makes sense that this emotion ought to berare, because the desire for revenge can beexceedingly destructive. In many cases, the targetsfeel violated themselves. They are now injured andmay start seeking revenge of their own.People begin taking justice into their own hands,because they think institutions cannot provide it. ToLarry Cagle, it often felt like the school system, thestate government, and even his union wereconspiring to stoke his anger, without any promiseof relief. After the strikes had kept schools closedfor half a month, the teachers' union called a pressconference. Its leadership had decided to throw inthe towel. "The legislature has fallen short onfunding the promise for the future of education inour state," said the head of the OklahomaEducation Association, Alicia Priest. Teachers shouldreturn to their classrooms. Anyone who missedanother day of work might be fired.This felt like a "gut punch," Cagle told me. "It wastreasonous for them to end it like they did without

treasonous for them to end it like they did, withoutasking all of us if we wanted to stop." Though theyreturned to their classrooms, Cagle and othereducators quickly began posting criticisms of theunion's leaders-and the teachers who supportedthem-on Facebook and Twitter. Soon afterward,Cagle found a flyer in his classroom. A few yearsearlier, he'd been arrested for drunk driving;someone had gone to city hall and photocopied hisarrest record and was handing it out to teachersand parents. His mug shot was posted onFacebook. Cagle suspected pro-union teachers."It was awful," Cagle said. "I had to tell mystudents about the arrest, about what hadhappened. It was the most shameful day I've everhad in a classroom, and the worst part was knowingit was other teachers who wanted to destroy me."The teacher strikes of 2018 won concessions insome states. In Oklahoma, the results were mixed.The walkouts inspired a number of educators to runfor political office and drew attention to classroomproblems that had languished for years. But theprotests have yet to produce higher salaries thanwhat was promised before the walkout, oradditional school resources. And they damagedrelationships with lawmakers that teachers willneed in the future. A Republicanstate representative named Kevin McDugle-whomCagle publicly described as "douchebag No. 1"-hadbeen fighting for teacher raises for years. "I votedfor every tax proposal for a teacher raise that camebefore us," McDugle told me. "You know what thatcost me politically? And this is what I get in return?I'm of half a mind to say screw these people.They're gonna get what they deserve."Since the protests have ended, Cagle has had a lotof time to think about what happened. Some mightfeel regret, believe that things got out of hand. Nothim. He wishes everyone had fought longer andharder. This summer, he told me he'dbeen collecting gossip about adversaries' sexualindiscretions to use as leverage in the next fight.(He later denied doing so.) Whatever faith he hadleft in the system has evaporated. He doesn'tdescribe what he feels as a desire for revenge; hesays he is focused on trying to make things better,to improve the school system. But inour conversations, he often seemed past the pointof compromise. "Next school year, we'll forceeveryone to realize this fight isn't over," he told meover the summer. "I hate to say it, but sometimesyou have to burn something down to save it."THOUGH IT IS ugly to admit, you may have feltsimilarly to Larry Cagle at some point in your life.You may have lost faith in Congress, your houseof worship, your employer. Perhaps you feel soangry at times that screaming isn't sufficient; youwant to make someone else scream. LikeCagle, you may be nearing a point where you arepast constructive solutions. You, too, may want toburn it all down.This is a scary place to be-for us as individuals, andfor the nation as a whole. The ways in which angeris constantly stoked from every side is new, andthe Partisan divide that such anger fosters mayhave pushed us further down a path towardwidespread violence than we realize. One recentworking paper found that the more partisan people

working paper found that the more partisan peoplebecome, the more likely they are to rationalizeviolence against those they don't agree with, toexperience schadenfreude or moral disinterestwhen they see an opponent get attacked, and evento endorse physical assaults on other groups."Though most Americans reject violence, as moreof us embrace strong partisanship, the prevalenceof lethal partisanship is likely to grow," wrote thepolitical scientists Lilliana Mason and NathanKalmoe.We should, in other words, be worried, perhapseven more than we already are. It seems like ourcurrent madness should be reaching its apex, thatrelief ought to be on the horizon. But the sources ofour anger run deeper than the presentpolitical moment.Cable news, Twitter, politicians who now do morecampaigning than governing-their every incentive isto keep us angry. But we own some of the guilt,too. I'm not proud to admit that I know what itfeels like to relish seeing an opponent get hiscomeuppance. I profess to hate what cable news isdoing to the national conversation, but I still tunein. I decry the nasty discourse on Twitter, thencheck back the next hour to refresh my outrage. Ideplore the nation's rank partisanship, but I rarelysplit my ballot.My anger has become a burden. Perhaps yours hastoo. And yet we can't turn away. The anger impulseis too deeply encoded, the thrill too genuine. Sowhere do we go from here?A Better Use for our FuryTHE PLAN, ON THE FACE OF IT, seemed crazy. Agroup of Israeli social scientists wanted to conductan experiment disguised as an advertisingcampaign. The ads would run in a small,conservative Tel Aviv suburb, where many peoplewere religious and supported right-wing politicians.The goal was to persuade the residents to abandontheir anger toward Palestinians and agree thatIsrael should freeze construction of Jewishsettlements in Gaza and the West Bank, amongother concessions.The suburb they were hoping to convert, Giv'atShmuel, was known for being strenuously opposedto anything associated with peaceniks, liberals, oranyone who said anything good about peaceniks orliberals. A few years earlier, residents had stoodalong a highway to throw rocks at passing carssimply because they suspected that the driversmight be headed to a gay-pride march.The proposed experiment ran counter to most ofpsychology's conventional teachings. The best-known theory regarding how to reduce conflict andprejudice within a population was known as the"contact hypothesis": If you can just get everyonewho hates each other to talk in a controlled,respectful manner, this doctrine holds, they'lleventually start speaking civilly. They won't likeeach other.But prejudices may fade, and moral outrages willmellow. The researchers figured that the contacthypothesis had clearly been developed by someonewho had never visited Israel. Polls in Giv'at Shmuelwere very clear. The residents didn't want to spendtime with Palestinians. They also didn't want

b h f d i l t i th h t

a bunch of academics lecturing them on how tobecome more open-minded. So the researcherscame up with a clever idea. Don't tell everyone inGiv'at Shmuel that they're wrong. Tell them thatthey're right: A perpetual war with Israel'sneighbors made a lot of sense. If anything, thepeople of Giv'at Shmuel ought to be angrier.With the help of an advertising agency, the socialscientists created online ads celebrating the tensionbetween Israelis and Palestinians, and extolling thevirtues of fighting for fighting's sake. One adshowed iconic photos of Israeli war heroes andproclaimed, "Without [war] we wouldn't have hadheroes. For the heroes, we probably need theconflict." The ad was scored with Wagner's "Flightof the Valkyries." Another ad featured footage of asoldier with a machine gun petting a kitten and aninfantryman helping an old man cross the street."What a Wonderful World" played in thebackground. Its tagline read, "Without [war] wewould never be moral. For morality, we probablyneed the conflict." The ads, along with brochuresand billboards began appearing in Giv'at Shmuel in2015. Over a sixweek period, according to polling,nearly all of its 25,000 residents saw them.Three days after the experiment started, the so-called Lone Wolf Intifada began, a wave of violentassaults across Israel that the researchers figuredwould make the people of Giv'at Shmuel even morepolarized. And yet, when the researchers conductedpolls in the suburb at the end of the advertisingcampaign, the residents who had held the mostextreme views at the outset of the experimentappeared to have softened. The percentage ofright-leaning residents who said that Arabswere solely responsible for Israel's past warsdecreased by 23 percent. The numberof conservatives who said Israel should be moreaggressive toward Palestinians fell by 17 percent.Incredibly, even though the advertisements nevermentioned settlements, 78 percent more peoplesaid that Israel should considerfreezing construction in the West Bank and Gaza.(Residents in nearby towns who hadn't seen theads were surveyed as a control; they showed nosuch evolution in their views over the same period.)A year after the ads had ceased, by which timesome residents had trouble recalling the specifics ofthe campaign, polls still showed greater tolerance.The campaign wasn't a panacea, but it is amongthe most successful conflict interventionsin contemporary social science.The campaign worked, the social scientists believe,because instead of telling people they were wrong,the ads agreed with them-to embarrassing,offensive extremes. "No one wants to think ofthemselves as some angry crank," one ofthe researchers, Eran Halperin, told me. "No onewants to be lumped in with extremists or theangriest fringe." Sometimes, however, we don'trealize we've become extremists until someonemakes it painfully obvious.AS AMERICA REACHES the midpoint of apresidential administration that has driven nearlyeveryone into a rage of one kind or another, we areat a crossroads: Will we continue, blindly furious?Or will we see our rage as a disease that must be

d? Th l h ld 't b t di t W

cured? The goal shouldn't be to eradicate anger. Wecouldn't if we tried, and as James Averill's studyshowed, we need our anger. We need it to air ourgrievances with our friends, family, and colleagues.We also need the moral outrage that motivatescitizens to push for a more just society. Neither theleft nor the right has a monopoly on justice;likewise, injustice can come from either side.But, in particular, people who have historically beendenied the right to express their anger-the womenof the #MeToo movement, the activists of BlackLives Matter-shouldn't be expected to give up thefight now.Still, we can't maintain this fever pitch, or we willrisk forfeiting the gains that good anger can bring.The most immediate task is to recognize our angerfor what it often is. The researchers in Israel heldup a mirror to the residents of Giv'at Shmuel in thehopes that the reflection would shock them.Americans would benefit from taking a similarlyhard look at their reflection-and we don't need toenlist the help of social scientists to do so. In asense, all of America has been living inGiv'at Shmuel for the past two years. The thingsthe president says at his rallies are so extreme thatthey are essentially absurdist provocations. Antifaactivists are brawling in the streets with the ProudBoys. The vitriol on display each night on cablenews-and even on late-night comedy shows-is overthe top. And no matter your political persuasion,your Facebook feed likely contains posts that wouldmake the ads in Giv'at Shmuel look sober.When we scrutinize the sources of our anger, weshould see clearly that our rage is often beingstoked not for our benefit but for someone else's. Ifwe can stop and see the anger merchants' self-serving motives, we can perhaps start to loosentheir grip on us.Yet we can't pin the blame entirely on the angerprofiteers. At the heart of much of our discontent isa very real sense that our government systems arebroken. Larry Cagle wasn't wrong to be livid at astate government that refused to allocate funds toeducate the next generation of Oklahomans; hismistake was succumbing to the view that the onlyway to fix the system was to destroy it.Many of the nation's most contentious issues aredriven by a feeling that our institutions have failedus. Historically, this feeling has been at the root ofsome of America's most important movements forchange. Ours, too, could be a moment for progress,if we can channel our anger to good ends, ratherthan the vanquishing of our enemies."It is not enough for people to be angry," MartinLuther King Jr. told an audience at Carnegie Hall inFebruary 1968. It was the 100th anniversary of thebirth of W. E. B. Du Bois, and King hoped to remindthose in attendance of his teachings, but also of hismethods. Du Bois, King said, had been an angryradical his whole life. He had furiously called forresistance. But he had also sought to make hisenemies into allies. He had overcome his anger inthe hopes of finding peace.As King spoke, protests were happening in NewYork and Paris. Soldiers were dying in Vietnam. Justover a month later, King would be assassinated inMemphis.

"Above all, he did not content himself with hurlinginvectives for emotional release and then to retireinto smug, passive satisfaction," King said to thecrowd about Du Bois. "The supreme task is toorganize and unite people so that their angerbecomes a transforming force." Article written byCharles Duhigg, The Atlantic

NEW Resource for Children: "Puffy Gets Angry"

"I just ordered a copy of Puffy Get's Angry and readit to my grand daughters, ages 5 & 3. The 5 yearold gets angry a lot and this book was helpful inpointing out the importance of breathing when herheart beats faster. We read it together andpracticed breathing with Puffy. I asked them if thisbook would be good for other children to read andthey gave it a thumbs up. Thank you for your greatbook." Steve Sumpter, MS, CAMS II, CTRSThis NEW children's book is designed to provide aguide for adults to help kids learn how to managetheir anger. The most difficult part of anger is theautomatic reaction of the primitive brain. Learninghow to slow down this automatic response is thekey to successfully managing anger. Becomingincreasingly aware of one's anger in the bodyrequires practice. When there is more awareness ofthe angry feeling, the child can use techniques likedeep breathing to calm him/her self down.Authors: Rich Pfeiffer, MDiv, PhD (President ofNAMA), and Susie Post RobertsISBN: 978-1-893505-98-8 Autographed Copy - Softcover - $9.99ORDER NOW __________________________________

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