Rage and Activism

Beginner's rage is violent. It's angry NOW and it wants results NOW and whatever is going to make the biggest difference, good or bad, constructive or destructive, NOW. It's admirable in its restless nature, in its urgency, but not in how it seeks to make a difference. What else can such an exasperated soul see but violence's role in the success of revolts, conquests, from good old fashioned rebellion to civil wars? What else can it see but how violence is effective in its own limited but powerful way, how above all else it cannot be ignored? Beginner's rage is ruthless in its cause, its passion. It is determined to the point that the anger burns away morality, and leaves only one goal- and that goal is left to be achieved through limited vision, limited logic, because of that anger and its subsequent distortion. Beginner's rage is a supreme example of hyperfocus- either that, or a particularly feisty mule with blinders. True rage, defined by a tearing open of the soul at the view of a gross injustice that not even the dead could forget or neatly hide away, is pacifistic. It's slower, crueler. It does not burn out and it has no plans of ever fading away. It will work out plans, for what beginner's rage sees in the efficacy of violence, true rage sees in logic. They know an intricately planned attack can show the oppressors in their true light while casting the protesters as innocents. True rage is the most dangerous because it gets the most done. It sculpts reality more than bombs and guns, more than cowardly attempts at intimidation. True rage does this because it takes a lot more to outsmart a brilliant mind than it does a brilliant gun. You can obliterate a building, kill just for numbers, but you can never, ever destroy an idea. Once it has been birthed into the world, you can't take it back. You can stifle and shame its believers, you can defame or discredit it, you can try your hardest to distort it until it's unrecognizable, but it would still exist. It stays. It stays, and something that can do that is dangerous. Effective. More beautiful than even the most dedicated non-pacifistic activism. It effortlessly trumps the beginner's rage and all activism that stems from it because an explosion is only beautiful when you're burning something you don't care about. While a fire can symbolize more than what it's obliterating, no matter what, it's still a fire. True rage does not want to destroy. It wants change from the inside, inside the earth, inside the mind, inside the body, inside the soul. The fire, the explosions- true rage sets them off where you can't see them, but can do the most with. You feel the earth change but everything is still- still enough to see how things could be different, still enough to imagine the concept of better, and most importantly, still enough to strategize how to make it happen. “Thinking about the desire for movement.. violence versus civil disobedience.” November 25th, 2010