Someone recently made me angry.
To clarify, it wasn't anger like I normally feel. (Which is not actually anger, by the way - it's more of a perpetual state of annoyance with humanity.) This was anger like spitting nails/breathing fire/seeing red.
Now, my first impulse was to fight back. I'm not easily cowed, and I'm certainly not easily intimidated. I may be a walking South Pacific song (a hundred and one pounds of fun, only sixty inches high, etc.) but personality-wise, I also fit the part of the song that happens to say, "Ev'ry inch is packed with dynamite." Sometimes I can be... er... explosive, if you will.
But in this situation, I thought maybe I should try to relax. Just because someone made me mad doesn't mean I have to fight back, right? So I tried to follow my roommate's example and turned to some Mormon personal revelation for guidance. By "Mormon personal revelation," I mean the normal process a lot of Mormons talk about from the pulpit on Sundays - I decided to open my scriptures and see what verses my eyes landed on first. The guidance I needed would then come from those verses. My roommate loves to talk about this method of personal revelation. From what she's told me, it works like a charm for her every time. It has answered her prayers about college plans, dating, and more. It has worked for me, too, and (on a serious note) it can be a very inspired way to find guidance from God about life and its challenges.
So, full of rage, I pulled out my scriptures and let them fall open. I expected to read verses like this:
"And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you." (Ephesians 4:32)
Or maybe this:
"But I say unto you, that ye shall not resist evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also;" (3 Nephi 12:39)
Or especially this:
"And blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." (3 Nephi 12:5)
However, the verses I turned to included nothing like that. Instead of finding some happy verses about being calm, I turned directly to stories about war. To specify, I turned to Alma.
Oops.
When trying to decide between fight or flight, reading verses like this is probably not the best idea:
"And he caused that all the people in that quarter of the land should gather themselves together to battle against the Lamanites, to defend their lands and their country, their rights and their liberties; therefore they were prepared against the time of the coming of the Lamanites." (Alma 43:26)
Or this:
"And now, as Moroni knew the intention of the Lamanites, that it was their intention to destroy their brethren, or to subject them and bring them into bondage that they might establish a kingdom unto themselves over all the land;" (Alma 43:29)
Or this:
"Nevertheless, the Nephites were inspired by a better cause, for they were not fighting for monarchy nor power but they were fighting for their homes and their liberties, their wives and their children, and their all, yea, for their rites of worship and their church.
"And they were doing that which they felt was the duty which they owed to their God; for the Lord had said unto them, and also unto their fathers, that: Inasmuch as ye are not guilty of the first offense, neither the second, ye shall not suffer yourselves to be slain by the hands of your enemies." (Alma 43: 45-46)
So clearly, if this was personal revelation, God wasn't telling me to take the situation lying down. Either that, or my personal revelation function was broken, and I was being fed all sorts of bad suggestions...
Later that day, I was reading an old Ann Coulter book while brushing my teeth. (What? Doesn't everybody read while brushing their teeth? If not, you totally should. It eliminates the boring factor in teeth-brushing, and it also leaves your teeth sparkling clean...) Yeah, yeah, I know, Ann Coulter is controversial or whatever, but hey - I've met the lady, and I think she's hysterical.
Anyway, I stumbled upon this passage in her book:
"Liberals simply can't grasp the problem LexisNexis poses to their incessant lying. They ought to stick to their specialty - hysterical overreaction. The truth is not their forte."
OH SNAP!
Seeing as how my anger had everything to do with one person's documented statements, as well as this same person's overreaction to the truth and this person's accusation of lying on my part, this was outrageously fitting to the situation at hand. Let me just change a few words to illustrate... (while still maintaining some sheen of anonymity, of course)
"[Person in question] simply can't grasp the problem [his/her] [words] pose to [his/her] incessant lying. [He/she] ought to stick to [his/her] specialty - hysterical overreaction. The truth is not [his/her] forte.
It makes more sense if you know who my anger was directed at, but...
Anyway, here was yet another encounter with the written word telling me not to surrender.
And then it got worse.
The next morning, I was reading while blowdrying my hair. (What? Doesn't everybody read while blowdrying their hair? If not, you totally should. It eliminates the boring factor in hair-blowdrying, and it also... leaves your hair dry? No, mostly is just makes the process less boring.)
Anyway, I've been reading Page Smith's "A New Age Now Begins: A People's History of the American Revolution" (because 1,700 pages of sometimes dubious and sometimes hilarious history is an excellent way to start off the morning...) and somehow - as my rage still simmered within me - this crazy book managed to speak to me too.
I encountered passages like this:
In spite of each parasite, each cringing slave,
Each cautious dastard, each oppressive knave,
Each gibing ass, that reptile of an hour,
The supercilious pimp of abject slaves in power,
We are met to celebrate in festive mirth,
The day that give our freedom second birth.
That tell us, British Grenville never more
Shall dare usurp unjust, illegal power,
Or threaten America's free sons with chains,
While the least spark of ancient fire remains.
That's not exactly screaming, "don't fight - just surrender," is it?
Then I hit this:
"That England should have repeatedly emphasized the ingratitude of the colonies is significant. The call for gratitude is the unmistakable signal that all moral authority has been dissipated; nothing is left but a generally fruitless appeal to gratitude. It is the cry of all parents who have lost, usually through their own obtuseness, the obedience of their children. And so Mother England mourned her ungrateful children, and was determined to punish them. Charles Townshend saw himself as the instrument of that chastisement. In the words of Edmund Burke: 'The whole body of courtiers drove him onwards. They always talked as if the King stood in a sort of humiliated state until something of the kind should be done.'"
This all makes sense in context, but I'm not going to give any context. Suffice it to say, though, I saw the instigator of my rage playing the role of England - completely in the wrong, but unwilling to acknowledge it; demanding gratitude and respect, and yet failing to earn it.
To quote William Pitt, "Here I draw the line."
So, to sum it up: Was I angry? Yes. Did I fight? Not to the full extent that I could have, but yes. Was it (all of my reading materials in a one-day period of time) personal revelation? Maybe.
It could have been three things:
1. Coincidence. So everything I read just happened to talk about fighting for a cause and/or defeating someone who deserves to be defeated - so what?
2. Me personally reading things into the materials at hand. I only saw the passages that applied to the situation, i.e. they didn't really apply, but I bent them to fit the narrative.
3. Or maybe God hates bullies as much as I do.
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