Let it be with our greatest intent: Anger, Grief, Conflict, Peace, Resilience

Beneath anger, there's grief. Within grief, there's gratitude. Anger channels the fire stoked by violated boundaries. It can clear the brush as wildfires do when there's too much left dry and crowded in the plain or forest to make way for the new. Or it can scorch the earth barren when years of fire suppression policy turn a regular event for maintenance into a congested pyre waiting to raze everything around it including the earth below. Rage emerges when perception for our normal paths of influence loses efficacy in the face of unrelenting anger. Rage emerges because there is a profoundly unmet need for healing.

Gratitude chooses something we honor from a situation and expresses it in ways that allow us to grow--it finds the warmth in the ember of the fires, or the paths and prairies cleared by the flames. Peace is being able to take genuine action in and from a place of love.

But how will you hold someone accountable when you won't hold them in the first place?
Who's responsible for holding whom, and historically who has done the most work to hold the other?

Most cultures avoid imagining anger in its full context--if anything, we tend to invalidate, avoid, and ignore its explicit presence.

What's the healthiest expression of anger you've ever witnessed?

Who teaches you when it is safe and appropriate to express joy?

Who teaches you when it is safe and appropriate to express anger?

As a nation, what events do our US History books celebrate or commemorate as a formative nation?

Was the 1770 Boston Massacre revered in US History as a moment for non-violent protest or did it become propagandic cause for honoring victims of an oppressive force that led to a certain Declaration of Independence?

Was the Boston Tea Party a violent protest because a British tea company chose to sell tea from China without paying taxes to the North American colonies?

The U.S. behavioral play book is littered with unacknowledged feats of anger, but crafty authors weave narratives to make it look like we've always solved our problems by muffling or omitting the work and hardship that more often than not remained unresolved.

We're only three generations away from Civil War-era slavery -- community elders in their 70s have great-grand parents, some whom they've met, who were slaves during the civil war.

The Civil War was a Union military victory by conventional standards, but the KKK emerged as a terrorist insurgency with so much influence, the reconstruction era policies and constitutional amendments remained gutted well into the late 1960s. 

State's Rights was the civil rallying cry for secessionist Confederate states long after they were defeated on the battle field. Separate but Equal rulings were put into place as a justification for segregating schools. The tax structure for school districts was then designed to further segregate school populations. By the time integrated schools were providing official US History textbooks to Black children across the nation, the American Legislative Exchange Council's founder began championing the privatized school industry as a way to legally perpetuate segregation by wealth.

So the basis for unresolved conflict and the modeling for destructive action has been with us since the beginning of the nation's settlement.

War is a form of conflict where the most influential cohesive parties acknowledge their will to risk abuse and annihilation for the sake of asserting their interests.

Conflict is a necessary phase of peace when it can exist with clear intention and phase into resolution:

There are times for peace building to prevent or help us better embrace unnecessary conflict.

There are times for peace making to intervene with conflicting trajectories of interest and apathy.

There are times for peace keeping to steward healing and restoration so that we can better build beyond our capacity for dwelling amid destruction.

And they cycle into one another so long as intention exists to guide that.

Destruction is also intrinsic to growth so long as we have capacity to identify the patterns and intention that allows for integrity to stand amid perceived chaos.

But let us remember there were and always will be more people who are looking to heal, some seeking to heal from past episodes of bloodshed, and still more whose deeper cause for rebellion comes from a need to heal something with immense impact that it extends to the societies we live in.

Medicines are best used to prevent unnecessary suffering. They embody conflict with intent. They exist with ceremony and ritual--the processes that foster emotional and intellectual solidarity for treatment to be trusted and implemented well.

Healing restores our capacity to care for ourselves and each other. Wealth is a form of collective health when our capacity to care for each other exists with the special kind of regenerative endurance we tend to call resilience.


Let us choose to make all of this be with the intentional arc of our healing in mind.