If you were born a peace-loving person, or if you have been the victim of violence yourself, you may find that accessing a deeper, honorable rage within yourself is not the easiest thing to do. Should you access it, you may also find that sustaining that anger beyond its initial fire is also not a simple matter. We all have causes that touch us personally, issues that are easy to get worked up about. But, often times, in identifying singular issues, we miss the bigger, holistic picture of how we can be bought off our indignation by tailor-made promises instead of junking those systems that hurt all of us. These systems of power are what we need to address, because part of their construction is to either strip us of our power or ask us politely to hand it over.

In pt 1 of this series, I targeted the easy marks of the government and the media as places to start, but, working from within to without, let’s start a little smaller and identify those issues that are within closer reach. To refer to the neighborhoods we grew up in, or the social circles we hang out in currently, I’ll just use the general word ‘culture’. I hope you’ll get my drift in the way that I use it. Here is an example:

You walk into your local coffeehouse. You see a couple sitting together, both on their laptops. He is drinking a double frappe mochaccino with a shot of espresso, and she is having a green tea. They are dressed exactly as you would expect them to be dressed.

They represent part of your culture, whether you want them to or not, or whether or not that is you sitting there with your loved one – so yes, the culture that you encounter in your immediate vicinity. Is that couple worth getting angry about? And what does it matter what they do, how they act, and what they drink?

The easy answer is that it doesn’t matter. It will be tricky to show you though why those things are worth getting angry about. Take for example your family. Unlike me, many people are close to and get along fairly well with their family, and wouldn’t have many bones to pick with their cousins or siblings other than little things not even worth mentioning. If you have been raised well, what would be worth getting angry about with them?

So, for your immediate culture, we’ll identify your local world: the coffeehouse, your family and friends, the neighborhood where you live, that sort of thing. And, just to be clear, I am not talking only about the straight world; I am also referring to alternative cultures and lifestyles, whether you hang out with punk rockers or goths or whatever. Whatever culture you find yourself in, that is what I am talking about – those immediate places and faces that you can touch and can touch you. The question becomes, “If I like where I live, like my surroundings, my dog, and my local coffeehouse, and my mom, and the school I grew up in, what does any of that have to do with being angry?”

Unfortunately, they are all part of the problem, and I can say that, pretty readily knowing that there are some exceptions. Whether they understand it or not, or whether you can easily see what I am saying or not, all these things mentioned are part of the smaller ends of the system that feed the larger systems that hover over us with control.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you get mad at your cousin for eating processed food and listening to some horrible award-winning band that he has spoon fed. Is it his fault that he is contributing to the demise of civilization?

Ok, I’m joking here, but I am only trying to illustrate the point that you must honestly identify those things around you that are not only hurting the people you love and the area you grew up in or the area you now call home, because they are also helping to feed something much larger that is hurting you.

Going back to the cousin who eats genetically-modified, corn syrup-laced doughnuts because, even though he knows they are bad for him, he “likes the taste.” Should any responsibility be assigned to him? The answer is yes. Being willing to see how the culture around you is contributing to what is wrong right now can help righteously sustain your anger, because it is hurting those near and dear to you.

So, without much doubt, the culture close to you is hurting you, hurting itself, and aiding and abetting systems that enslave us. And that should make you quite angry indeed. Conformity to anything means someone else is pulling the strings, and all they have to do is find the right string to pull. There is nothing Love-based in manipulation. Love has nothing to do with how someone convinces you to buy something, or eat something without telling you that it is going to help destroy your kidney. These are not little crimes against humanity, but one big fraud against humanity.

They, whoever they are, need us, whoever we are, to believe that we aren’t worth much at all. And they seem to be doing a very good job.