Why I Am Angry – Or Down The Rabbit Hole

photo © 2006 Samantha Marx | more info (via: Wylio)
A lot of people tell me I am angry and that I should tone things down.

I am sorry. I cannot.

I don’t know how to explain it to you. I don’t know how to tell you that the reason I seem angry to you is because I have seen things you have not seen, felt things you have not felt, gone places you have not gone, and know people you do not know.

I am angry in a way you cannot comprehend because you have not been down the rabbit hole.

I don’t know how to explain to you the frustration I feel at the people who are standing in line to volunteer over the holidays because they want to “help the less fortunate” – because in order to understand that anger, you would have to have sat outside with my homeless friends in the bitter cold of February and wonder where everyone is now. You would have had to explain to more than several people in October that you don’t have the money to help them get into housing – because all the money arrives over the next two months.

I don’t know how to explain that anger to someone who has never walked into a multi-million dollar church building, spoken to the receptionist, the senior pastor’s secretary, the youth minister and the mission’s co-ordinator – only to be told there is no money to help homeless people. Later that day you spend some of your own money to pay for a prescription for a homeless lady who sleeps behind the dumpster of that same church every night – I don’t know how to explain how that feels to you either.

Or how to explain the feeling you get that night when you have to go home and tell your wife that because you spent the money on the prescription, the dinner and a movie you had planned for tonight is now a dollar movie from the Redbox and cheap takeout. And the frustration you feel after the movie, when you realize it’s raining and you wonder if the homeless lady sleeping behind that church’s dumpster is dry. And you wonder if you are the only one wondering that.

If you have experienced none of that, my anger will make no sense to you.

Maybe it is wrong of me to cry out in frustration because when I mention any of this on Facebook or Twitter, people talk about good intentions or not judging people. Nobody talks about the harm we do when we allow convenience and control to override compassion and mercy.

I am angry. And frustrated. And I cannot make you understand why. And you take it personally. I wish you would not.

I don’t know how to explain that the reason I support the rights of gay people and am critical of the church in this area is because I have held a crying lesbian in my arms who came out to her mother and then was forced to leave home at 16. She was pressed into a life that included prostitution for survival, drugs for escape and contracting HIV as a consequence.

Why was she cast out? Because the preacher told Mommy that is what God wanted Mommy to do. If you have not heard that story from the sobbing, snotting mouth of a gay 23 year old who hates the church and her mother and the preacher and all that, but misses Jesus – I don’t know how to explain it to you, or explain to you why it makes me angry.

Or how to explain that while you are worried about what you perceive as the sin she commits with her genitals, I am caught up in the sin of a society that would allow any of that to happen to her, or the sin of a preacher who would use his power and influence to harm a vulnerable girl, or the sin of a church that prizes doctrinal correctness over being kind and humane. Or the sin of a mother who would choose to worship a god that would tell her to sacrifice her daughter to make the god happy.

See, you may know that 17 million children go to bed hungry in the US, but I know a kid named Andre. I have sat in his living room and watched a roach crawl across his foot as he eats a cold, out of date hot dog because that is all the food there is in the house. And then I go on Twitter, and it happens to be summer time and everyone is excited because the new Iphone is coming out and they are standing in line and talking about it all and it just all seems a bit insane to me – because I know Andre.

But if you talk about that, they call you angry. Or out of touch with the way the world works or an extremist or some damned thing.

And I guess they are right – I am angry. But not at you – I am angry at the way things are. If you feel I am picking on you or attacking you – I am not. It is just that I wish you were angry about these things too. I wish you had been down the rabbit hole. Maybe then we could work together to make a new reality, instead of pretending that everything is OK with this one.

But until that day comes, I am going to have days when I am angry. I hope you will bear with me. And if you need directions to the nearest rabbit hole, just let me know.