Wikimedia Commons

The age of rage

Who or what are you angry at today in these unUnited States?

The question begs to be asked in a country where people seem to be raging evermore.

When The Atlantic on April 1 reported a national epidemic of anger, I admit to at first thinking the story might be an April Fool’s Day prank, but a reading of social media these days makes it obvious the magazine was onto something.

So, who or what is to blame?

Some – including Pope Leo – are sure to point a finger at President Donald Trump, who is clearly an attention-seeking narcissist who thrives on creating chaos. Some Trumpsters, maybe many, believe the country is in need of this sort of shakeup, and Trump has definitely been delivering on that front.

The “No Kings” crowd, on the other hand, fears that “Trump wants to rule over us as a tyrant” and is very angry, bordering on violently angry, about that.  The country’s Constitutional system of checks and balances has, however, stopped him well short of achieving that goal, if that is his goal.  The courts have held firm against a variety of Presidential edicts, and the Congress, though generally on his side on most issues, hasn’t exactly been moving in lockstep.

As for what Trump truly wants, only Trump knows – if even he knows.

Having once worked for Alice Rogoff, a woman who bought the Anchorage Daily News to pursue her dream of becoming the Queen of the Arctic only to bankrupt it, I gained some personal insight into those suffering from narcissistic personality disorder.

Rogoff was the best boss in the world right up until the time she wasn’t. In the good, old days, she left Tony Hopfinger and Amanda Coyne alone to build an online news organization that could put enough pressure on The McClatchy Company that it would decide to sell its only Alaska operation.

Building things is hard work, which explains why Rogoff was little seen in the offices of the online-only Alaska Dispatch News in those days, and why her appearances were mainly considered entertaining. Scott Woodham early on tagged her as the Dispatch’s “Yosemite Sam,” the “toughest, rip-roarin-est, Edward Everett Horton-est hombre whatever packed a six-shooter!”

One could pretty well describe Trump as another rootin,’ tootin’, shootin’ Sam, and his election as president might say more about where this nation is today than about Trump. Trump was elected because a majority of Americans didn’t like the way government was run when he was out of office, and clearly bought into his agenda of Make America Great Again (MAGA).

Now, we can all have a debate about what the hell MAGA means to any individual American. To some, obviously, it means a return to the racist nation that predated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. To others, it might mean a return to the manufacturing powerhouse that saved the world from Nazism and Japanese Fascism.

And, yes, though most don’t realize it, it was American manufacturing, not war fighting, that played the biggest role in the Allied victory in World War II. As documentary filmmaker Ken Burns observed in “The War,” “American industry provided almost two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment produced during the war.”

Without that equipment, the armies of Russia and the United Kingdom would have been overwhelmed. The outcomes of most wars have been decided more by manufacturing and logistics than by what happens on the battlefield, which is worth remembering with Chinese manufacturing capabilities steadily on the rise.

Whatever the case, as regards Trump in all of this, he is clearly a lightning rod for the focus of American anger on both sides of the political spectrum. He has his lovers and his haters, and they’re now pretty much engaged in “The War of the Roses.”

Deeper roots

But let’s be real here. That is all politically driven anger in a country where less than 60 percent of the population voted in the last Presidential election, with some of that 60 percent not all that interested in the outcome one way or the other.

The country isn’t overrun with those politically motivated and always active folks now called “super voters,” who show up for every and any sort of election because they deeply care about politics. Catalist, a website that tries to track and quantify this sort of thing, estimates only 38 to 47 percent of voters fall into this category.

So you gotta figure that the political anger of the moment, which attracts the vast proportion of mainstream media attention, involves less than half the people in the country, leaving more than half of the nation angry about other things, like a parking spot, maybe.

A raging disagreement over a parking spot is what Seattle’s KOMO News said witnesses reported as the event that set the stage for a gunfight in a Pioneer Square parking garage in February. One man ended up dead, and three other people were injured.

The death might be considered unusual, but not the violent battling over parking spaces. See the “Brawl over snow-cleared parking spot critically injures man in Philadelphia,”  “Video Captures Wild Fight Over Saved Parking Space In New York City” or, from Laredo, Texas, “Parking lot brawl ends in aggravated assault arrest.”

It’s pretty hard to blame Trump, an equally bombastic, attention-loving and shit-stirring Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. , or any other pol for this sort of thing

So why the hell is everyone so angry in the most comfortably well-off country in the world?

OK, some aren’t well-off and resent those who are well off or seemingly so. Locally, in Anchorage, this helps explain the rampant theft attributable to some of the homeless, who think they can snatch anything that isn’t nailed down because, “Hey, you’re not using it, and you’ve got plenty of other stuff.”

This doesn’t excuse such thievery, but at least it offers one explanation. And the people they steal from have good reasons to be angry. So that’s one thing.

But what’s the explanation for all of the motorists who get red-in-the-face mad at the very thought of slowing traffic in Alaska’s largest city to help save some of the increasing number of pedestrians being killed on Anchorage roads every year?

Have we really become a country where people can get angry about the idea that it might take them a few minutes longer to drive across town to save a life? Do Anchorage drivers really believe their convenience is more important than that life itself?

You’d think so when you listen to them ranting about how they’re not going to slow down until the city starts arresting all the “jaywalkers.”

Shouldn’t it be penalty enough, in the eyes of the motoring crowd, that many of those jaywalkers already lack an easier way to get around than walking or pedaling a bike? Maybe instead of fining drivers for speeding and other traffic violations, the state Legislature should alter the penalty for traffic offenses to require that people caught speeding or running red lights use so-called “active travel” or mass transit for a week or two.

Then they might understand the punishment pedestrians and cyclists now endure if, of course, you consider getting around under your own power an intolerable strain – something the motor-vehicle (MV) clogged roads of this country would indicate most Americans believe.

Not to mention that there is a distinct possibility that getting out of those MVs would help lower the American anger level.

Why? Because of the physiology of anger itself.

Fat, lazy and angry

Everyone in the country is now surely familiar with the epidemics of obesity and lack of fitness that stem from the so-called “sedentary lifestyle,” which involves a whole lot of sitting to view computer screens or television screens or to peer at a roadway on the far side of the windshield screen.

Or hopefully, there are drivers peering at the roadway. So much distracted driving is going on in the country today that you have to wonder how many people actually turn off the electronic screens when they get behind the steering wheel.

Whatever the case, all this sitting means a whole lot less moving, and what researchers have learned is that lack of movement influences brain function for the worse. People who move end up happier than those who sit, or as the American Psychological Association puts it, “regular exercise…can decrease the effects of stress on the body, improve mental health and mood, and even enhance memory and cognition.”

The Association is particularly big on the stress issue, noting that “exposure to long-term stress can be toxic to multiple systems in the body, even leading to medical concerns like high blood pressure and a weakened immune system, along with mental illnesses like anxiety and depression.

When you take a close look at the way people live and work in this country today, you really have to wonder if a big part of our national anger problem isn’t linked to people sitting for much of the day with brains overloading on the work they need to get done only to find themselves rolling into transportation systems that were supposed to provide them “freeways” home, but instead have become MV battlegrounds.

As a result, stress skyrockets and people suffer from what psychologists are now calling “hurry sickness.” Kandi Weins, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, describes it as  “a chronic feeling of urgency and the compulsive need to rush through life. People experiencing hurry sickness often find themselves constantly pressed for time, leading to a pattern of frantic behavior, multitasking, and frequently checking the clock.”

So one question here: Who doesn’t feel this way?

I did a lot of thinking about this while Outside in a warmer climate spending considerable hours cycling on American roads in preparation for a 100-mile ride to celebrate my birthday.

When you’re on a bike in this country, you notice a lot more of the really bad driving that has become the norm in the U.S., and you all too often witness drivers doing stupid things that put your life at risk.

When some idiot makes a dangerous close pass at speed (something illegal in 35 states and many municipalities, including Anchorage), I admit to getting pissed at him or her for ignoring how easy it is to kill a vulnerable road user.

But here’s the weird thing. That anger only lasts for a blip in time. I’ve never actually counted how many pedal strokes it takes before it’s gone, but it’s not all that many.

I only wish this were the same when I’m behind the wheel. But it isn’t. When someone in a car or truck engages in dangerous, stupid, or simply discourteous behavior, the anger doesn’t pass quickly.

I often have to work to tamp down the emotions that make me want to behave like the 96 percent of drivers polled by AAA. The emotional reactions that arise when driving and when cycling are night and day, and researchers have documented are physiological reasons.

“….Nurses who maintained regular exercise behavior exhibited lower levels of state anger and higher levels of anger control than the nurses who did not, which is consistent with the results of previous studies that exercise behavior has a positive effect on anger reduction and stress control,” a group studying anger in Korean hospital workers reported in the peer-reviewed Asian Nursing Research.

The latest research – published just this month in Acta Psychologica, a peer-reviewed psychology journal – reported finding a “psychophysiological framework in which higher cardiorespiratory fitness enhances stress regulation capacity, thereby shaping emotional responses to aversive stimuli. 

“Participants with lower V̇O₂max (a classic measure of fitness) presented a more volatile temperament, anger expression, and lower anger control than those with higher V̇O₂max, indicating that regular physical exercise can be a useful non-pharmacological strategy for anger management. Similar results have been presented in studies involving stressful occupations.”

V̇O₂max might also help explain the “grumpy old man syndrome,” given that V̇O₂max naturally declines with age, especially among those who fail to engage in the aerobic exercise needed to diminish the decline. Maybe this is part of the reason why Trump seems to be so often angry.

Enter the internet

At the moment, I am blessed with a V̇O₂max of 42, which leads my Garmin sport watch to calculate my “fitness age” at 58.5 years, a mark I passed some time ago.

So if everything here was solely about V̇O₂max, I probably wouldn’t – like many others – regularly find myself getting angry at the idiocy on the internet, but it’s hard to avoid getting angry at internet idiocy becuase there is so much of it.

There are reasons why “rage bait” became the “The Oxford Word of the Year 2025,” and why people are regularly described as having been “triggered” by social media.

“Rage bait,” according to the Stanford Report, “is the negative, vengeful cousin of clickbait. Where clickbait titillates your imagination with an alluring headline (“You’ll never believe what happened next!”) that nudges you to click, rage bait engages negative emotions, often provoking you to make harsh comments.”

Unfortunately, what constitutes the catalyst for “rage bait” is often in the eyes of the beholder, and some rather simple, online news posts can trigger comments that come to fuel rage bait.

For instance, Atlanta News First on Saturday posted a pretty innocuous story about “Driver accused of honking at cyclists, hitting 2 in Cherokee County” and linked the story on its Facebook page, where the raging quickly started.

Luckily, the two cyclists were only injured, not killed, which led some to applaud the behavior of 72-year-old Jerry Wayne Ross, the driver involved.

“Not all heroes wear capes,’ wrote Benjamin Gray Anderson, who racked up 25 “likes.”

It’s hard to determine what is more difficult to understand about that post; someone thinking that it is heroic to use the one of the most common dangerous weapons in the country to harm others, or the stupidity of putting your name to such a comment (or liking it) when it could come back to bite you in the ass were you to be involved in a collision with a vulnerable road user.

Even if the collision were to be only marginally your own fault – say you hit a bump, spilled coffee in your lap and took your eyes off the road for only a second as someone stepped off the a curb – such a comment lends weight to the idea you didn’t care if you ran someone over or not.

This might not matter to law enforcement, which generally gives sober drivers a pass on killing vulnerable road users in this country no matter how bad their driving, (You’ll pay a $100 fine in Anchorage if you commit such a homicide.) But social media comments suggesting that running into anyone is a good thing could cause real problems in civil court if that anyone, or surviving family members, decide to sue.

Comments like Anderson’s make a motorist look predisposed to run over anyone believed to be getting in the way.

Atlanta’s Brandon Bailey pretty well summed up how out of control this attitude after someone suggested that it was “mean” to endorse clipping “parents, grandparents, husbands, wife’s, sons and daughters” on bikes. Bailey’s reply?

“Gimps, retards, speed bumps, can’t do the speed limit twats, can’t keep to the right and not block the fucking road pieces of shit,” he wrote.

All of which helped the Facebook discussion spin all out of control, as so often happens, with Raul Moreira logging in to express his hope that Ross “gets raped in jail.”

From there, the back and forth raging went on and on with both cyclists and motorists getting angrier and angrier. There’s no telling where this sort of thing ends. There has already been one case of an angry cyclist shooting an angry driver.

Fox26 in Houston five years ago reported that 26-year-old Jose Angel Hernandez told a man and his wife to get their bikes out of the road. An argument followed and Hernandez took off.

Then, however, he returned and knocked the woman off her bike with his car. The husband at that point opened fire and wounded Hernandez. Authorities concluded the shooting was justified.

“As for the driver…Hernandez remains hospitalized under guard and charged with Aggravated Assault with a Deadly Weapon,” the Fox-TV station reported. It added that for some Houston cyclists, “ride preparation includes grabbing their gun to carry.

“Retired Houston police officer Eddy Day says he’s done it once for a ride.

“‘I’ve but a lot of miles on a bike, and I carried it on the White Oak bike trail because we’d had several robberies,’ he says.

“He’s not alone. On Facebook posts, a number of local cyclists say they’re armed when they ride, because it’s not worth the risk to be left so vulnerable without protection. Federal statistics show 34 cyclists were killed in Houston just in 2020.”

The story made it sound as if Houston is as dangerous a place to ride a bike as Anchorage has become as a place to go for a walk. America’s northernmost metropolis seems to be vying to become the deadliest city in the country for pedestrians and a lot of drivers don’t seem to care because they’re angry about everything and anything that slows them down.

Luckily, there has been no gunfire yet, but you have to wonder how long it is until that happens in a state where anger has become us.