4 Books on the Transcendent Power of Rage
Let anger be your sledgehammer against a broken system
In 1968, a landmark year for righteous anger, Fred Rogers wrote “What Do You Do With the Mad That You Feel?” — a song that would provide scores of preschoolers with a self-regulating menu of alternatives for “when you feel so mad you could bite.” The song’s takeaway is that finding nonviolent ways to channel your anger is an important part of being an adult: “I can stop when I want to,” Rogers sings.
Two decades later, in 1987, Toni Morrison warned against the “paralyzing emotion” of anger: “It’s an absence of control, and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers… and anger doesn’t provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever.”
It’s easy to misread both Rogers’ and Morrison’s words as arguments against anger: versions of “I choose not to get mad, and so should you.” This interpretation would align, at least, with a strain of cultural wisdom that conflates restraint with respectability — the same line of thinking that assigns “angry” as a…
