A thoughtful rant on being angry

(Hmm -- the reverse doesn't quite work, does it: "An angry rant on being thoughtful")

I'm angry. And I don't know what to do with my anger.

This is unusual for me, and I am uncomfortable with it. Anger is not my typical state, and I don't have much practice in dealing with it.

But I have been trying to get in better touch with my feelings rather than over-analyzing everything, and this has shaken loose some stuff and stirred other things up. And the emotional approach has brought me not just to new realizations, but to stomach-tightening enlightenment about the scope of some of those realizations.

I have held women -- so many, too many -- as they poured out their pain at how some man took their trust and abused it, took their body and abused it. I know women -- so many, too many -- who have been manipulated by society and men to believe that abusive behavior is normal and acceptable from men. Some days, it feels like every woman in the world has been programmed in this way.

And it fills me with anger, nearly to raging. Caring makes me want to set things aright; the anger makes me want the solutions to be forceful and complete. I feel the urge to track down every man who has ever violated or abused a woman, ever coldly used a woman for his own purposes without any thought of her as a person, and break him into pieces. That's what the anger urges. Or, failing that, to at least break something.

But I know that more violence is not the answer, that violence begets violence, and that it is actually a twisted form of what I am feeling now that led those men to abuse women in the first place. Rather than giving in to the anger's urge to violences, I instead channel it into something useful, like working out or digging or working in the garden. Pity any weed that crosses my path.

Some men, when they feel like this, pick fights just so they have the excuse to beat the shit out of someone and in that way use up some of the crazy energy and frustration. This is certainly not an approach of which I approve. But today I understand it a bit better.

Sometimes being a "decent" man, a man who would never do the things which I bemoan above, doesn't feel like enough. Males seek solutions, and the anger demands the solutions be significant -- fix something, break something, stop something, start something. But how to start, when it feels like a problem inherent in one's sex?

Sometimes being a man means to feel tainted by association.

I'm angry. And I don't know what to do with my anger.