Our Collective Diapers

In high school they called me the Class Arguer. I was an angry teenager and I was up for an aggressive disagreement on any topic — how I dressed, how I spoke, how I spent my time, how I danced, how I wore my hair. You name it, I could stake out an opinion and defend it. I come from a very verbal gene pool. I learned to read and write early. I’m a talker. I’ve always been this way. Give me a topic and I’ll give you a diatribe. Debate is my superpower.

So, as you might imagine, I could have a lot to say right now about all the happenings in the world. I’ve got a mouthful of opinions waiting behind the gates of social acceptance to spew forth in unmitigated self-importance and the blind ecstasy of righteousness. Please, nail me to the cross of my sentence structure and hold me accountable for my sassiness, because I’ve got some paragraphs in here just waiting to rip through your confirmation bias and sink your ship of state. Boy, oh, boy, am I angry. But who cares? Really. Who cares what I think?

No one. Precisely no one cares what I think. Most likely because their brains are already fully occupied by what they think. And that’s fine. We should all be thinking right now. We have painted ourselves into a corner here with all our rules that don’t solve our problems and all our problems that don’t fit with our preconceived ideas about how things should work. Our entire civilization is stuck in adult diapers throwing a temper tantrum over the painful rash. But we used up all our clean water on legal pollution. Our personal protective equipment is stuck in a trade war between tribes who think they’re special even though we all share the same biology. The new buzz word is “lizard brain” — a phrase that implies our intelligence is shrinking from analysis to knee jerk. Our rash has made us irrational.

Oh, yes, I’m angry. But here’s the thing about my anger: Anger is not a solution. My need to express it is much greater than your need to hear it. My need to say what I think is much greater than your need to know. My need to vent is much greater than your capacity to absorb it. That’s what’s out of balance in the world. Our oversupply of anger is tipping us into catastrophe. Meanwhile our rash burns.

How did we all get so angry? Do we spend too much time listening to anger? Are you a doom scroller? Maybe it’s just anger that’s making us so angry. There’s a lot of money to be made in anger. Is your anger somebody’s income? Keeping us angry is a way to manipulate us. Look who’s pimping anger. Our anger is creating chaos. It’s burning up our resources. Time to focus, organize, get a grip on the excrement of our fear, cleanse the anger from our minds, and redesign the future of our species. Stop the burn. Our collective diapers need changing.