Call me Ishmael.
Or call me Frank. Call me Ken or Alan. Call me Geoff, Jonah, Jake or Jahangir. Just don’t call me Will. You see, I am about to go online, and it wouldn’t do for anyone to know exactly who I am. This is important because there is much anger in the world, and I am about to venture into it.
Can you imagine? Can you imagine feeling so much hostility that just because you’re working late in a hot office, and you’ve been hoping to read a few responses to a discourse you started about your favorite sport on the USSRA’s website bulletin board called talksquash, and instead you start to read an entry from one of those anonymous know-it-all jerks, some guy who is a self-professed expert on everything from the history of the game to technique and training, some guy who feels that he is too above it all to be civil with bourgeois bedpan scum like you, some guy who ignored your main point and flamed you publicly, and so you rebuke him and he then shows you the equivalent of an online three-finger-read-between-the-lines, so you ask your 13-year-old nephew to figure out who the guy is for real, you take down your AK-47 that you sent away for from [italics] Soldier of Fortune [end italics] magazine, and you track him down and LET THE DIRTBAG HAVE IT HEEHEEHEEHEE WOULDN’T THAT BE GREAT??
I mean terrible. “That truly would be terrible” is what I mean to say. And that is the point, of course. If we are going to be able to have successful conversations (online or off), we must learn to control our anger. How do we do that? First, we must learn to recognize its signs.
If you find yourself going to a computer site to order new computer gear (like, say, a new keyboard) after reading the latest online installment of talksquash, that could be a sign.
If you regularly write a check to your squash club for new glass doors for the squash court, you might have a tendency to get hot under the collar.
If you find yourself looking up creative ways of telling someone that you –er – [italics] disagree [end italics] with them without being censored online, it could be a hint.
If you find that your opponents’ protective eyewear is starting to look an awful lot like a football helmet, you either have a very large swing or you might have developed a reputation for something other than sportsmanship.
Once we have recognized anger, we can start to learn to control it. Sometimes, however, we can be fooled into thinking we have it controlled when, in fact, it is only hidden beneath the surface. Once I saw a young man come into the dining room of a private club and let his bag drop to the floor.
“Waiter!”
“Yes, sir?”
“You may have these racquets,” he said with obvious distaste for the bag. “Please take them away. If you don’t want them, feel free to sell them to someone.”
If an audience had been watching this interaction from afar, they might have been deceived into thinking that the young man was exceptionally calm and rational – that he had learned to control his anger. But that isn’t the truth. The trick is to put things into perspective.
Let’s take the case of the online know-it-all: does it really matter in the overall scheme of your life if the guy flames you anonymously? Is it more consequential than serious things like world hunger or the Bosnia problem? Yes. No question. You don’t even know where Bosnia is. Dave Barry, the noted columnist, once wrote that: “This is why psychologists recommend, when you feel your anger getting out of control, that you practice a simple yoga technique: Imagine that you’re in a peaceful, quiet setting such as a meadow, then take a deep breath, then exhale slowly, then gently s-q-u-e-e-z-e that trigger. See how much better you feel?”
Of course, the reality is that anger serves no one. When you get angry in print, most people tend to discredit the opinions levied by the angry one. But, on the other hand, it is just as harmful to yourself if you keep your emotions bottled up (unless, of course, you want to work for the postal service). That’s why you should try hard to keep a sense of humor. If you can’t, though, make sure you keep your anonymity. How many people have 13-year-old nephews, anyway?
Note: the above article was written with apologies to Dave Barry, who supplied some of the best lines in an article he wrote some years ago about road rage called, “It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad, world.”
