In Canada, as with the U.S.A. Tea Party, there is a festering inchoate anger...in fact, it seems almost everybody is angry.

* 19 Feb 2011

Rage

David Sherman holds a BA and LLB from the University of Toronto, and an LLM (Master of Laws) in Taxation Law from Osgoode Hall Law School of York University. He was called to the Bar of Ontario in 1983. He is a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Canadian Bar Association, the Ontario Bar Association and the Canadian Tax Foundation. He has specialized in tax for over 30 years.

It seems society is seething with anger and conflicts around the world, David Sherman writes

T hey’re calling it Days of Rage in the Middle East, but over here, people have been steamed for a long time. And the anger is not limited to the Tea Party zealots across the border, anxious to take their country back, or the gunman in Tucson or the man who walked into a Detroit police station and opened fire.

There’s a festering inchoate anger right here at home, in the guy behind you at the traffic light, the cashier at the supermarket, the straphangers on the morning bus, maybe even in the person lying beside you at night.

In fact, it seems almost everybody’s angry. We point overseas and list the reasons people are mad as hell and won’t take it anymore: chronic unemployment, widening gap between rich and poor, dwindling services, imperious leaders, disenfranchisement, powerlessness. Sound familiar?

Here, more and more people are simmering. Tom Caplan knows. He’s a Montreal anger management specialist, much of his clientele mandated to see him by the court. He says business gets better every year.

People are vulnerable right here, Caplan says, desperately trying to make enough money to stay afloat, both halves of a couple working for the good life, but finding it takes all of their energy to simply tread water.

“There’s a lot of stress on people just to make money to survive,” he says. Stereotypically, women who feel vulnerable tend toward depression or fear. Men, he says, get angry. “When you feel vulnerable, you do what you can to protect yourself,” he says. Anger can be manipulated easily, as history has taught, and our own government wields it well, aiming it like a long gun at the policies it wishes to promote. The Tories tell us we’re angry at the “unreported” crime rate and hungry for new prisons, anxious about the Russian threat to our northern sovereignty, longing for billions of dollars of fighter jets and warships; upset about illegal immigration, our fingers desperate to caress the triggers of unregistered firearms, squeeze the necks of tax-and-spend Liberals, nation-crushing separatists and coalitionists.

The government is trying to use our anger as a cudgel against its enemies, which, in this case, is anyone that doesn’t think like them. And, we are led to believe, if we keep the tax-and-spend Liberal barbarians from the gate and give the keys to the kingdom to the tax-cut-andspend Tories, we will return to the post-Second World War promise of paradise — a suburban bungalow for every family, an aproned mother in every kitchen, an ever blossoming stock portfolio, a gleaming Chevrolet in every driveway, made by cutrate labour, if possible.

If you’re angry, blame the helpless and the hopeless, the criminal, the sick, the immigrant, the well-educated and the unionized. It’s their fault.

In the U.S., the right has taken the same approach. The anger is levelled, figuratively and literally, against the embodiment of an ideology it dislikes, often stained with the racism upon which the country was founded. Taking the country back means bleaching it white, back to the good old days when the help stayed in the kitchen and knew their place.

It would seem that no matter where it’s situated, here or over there, and no matter its target, the anger comes from the same place. People are feeling powerless, no longer in control of their destiny, manipulated by forces they cannot get a handle on or sometimes even understand, their futures uncertain and dubious. The dream is out of reach. North America now seems not the land of plenty, but a land where poachers have picked off the good jobs and the good life, and big business has become, as one writer described investment banker Goldman Sachs, a “giant sucking vampire squid.”

The bumper sticker days of Pierre Trudeau’s Just Society, or Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, are a quaint reminder of a day when leaders at least espoused a philosophy that justice and equality somewhat mattered. Today, it is buy stocks, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper suggested during the onslaught of the recession, or go shopping, as George W. Bush advised. Or maybe just go away.

It’s easy now to look around us and see a place where the masters, for the most part, have become servants and the banquet table that was the American dream for most white people has been sealed off by a velvet rope.

In the ’50 and ’60s when the civil rights movement roiled through the U.S., when African-Americans could no longer stomach being 10th class citizens in the country they helped build, when the rage of the disenfranchised turned people to crime and drugs and boiled over into marches and flaming cities, the U.S. beefed up the police forces, called in the National Guard, built more prisons and enacted tougher sentences. Today, about one in three AfricanAmericans are in the justice system.

For many or most African-Americans, the so-called American dream was a myth, the land of opportunity was really a continent of despair.

It would seem that white people are now feeling the identical sting. Jobs have been shipped overseas, workers everywhere are told by wellfed patricians to tighten their belt. Wanting a decent wage is indecent, unless of course you’re a member of the entitled few with access to the highest floors of the glass towers for whom they will print an endless row of zeros on your bonus cheque, often with a helping hand from the taxpayer.

“There’s a sense that we’re all victims,” says Dr. Gerald Wiviott, senior psychiatrist at the McGill University Health Centre and associate professor at McGill. “People feel less control. People are feeling others are ripping off the system. There’s a great deal of anger.”

Wiviott, who grew up in the U.S., says while African-Americans have never felt entitled, white people did and do and their rage at suddenly being excluded can easily top anything their black neighbours felt or feel. And various bogeymen aside, there is no shortage of things to rile a person.

For the fortunate who work, the work week has expanded. And the pay cheque has shrunk while the demands upon it keep growing. Bank fees to allow you access to your own money take a piece, the 1,000-channel cable universe, an endless glowing choice of channels telling you to buy, buy and buy takes a piece, your indispensable cellphone takes another chunk, the fuel for the one or two or three autos in the driveway chews away even more and the Internet, where even your e-mail comes with personalized exhortations to buy, buy and buy, takes another piece. In fact, utilities, government and banks take their slice often before you can take out enough to buy yourself a beer at the end of the week.

In the cities, rents keep climbing, home equity if you have it is threatened, and trying to phone anyone to complain about anything usually means being answered by a purring mechanical voice telling you your call is important and to keep holding; someone on the other side of the planet reading from a script will be happy to attempt to mollify you.

With the anger comes the need to place responsibility. Jews, Muslims, blacks, immigrants of any hue and politicians all become targets.

Conveniently, the institutions that are slowly, inexorably squeezing the wealth out of society, i.e. financial institutions, telecoms, Big Pharma and Big Oil are somehow off the radar.

And while the working person is being squeezed few pundits or politicians ponder how to balance consumer confidence and debt levels with the prized “efficiencies,” code for work more earn less. The role of a citizens has now become limited to that of a consumer, and as a recent piece, The Rise of the New Ruling Class in Atlantic Monthly observes, if we no longer earn enough to consume, there are billions of people in China, India and Europe dying to open their wallets.

Yes, there’s a growing anger everywhere, but if you’re thinking of pulling your own day of rage, recall the G8/G20 debacle and remember civil rights can be illusory and they’re building lots of cells. But then again, some days, three hots and a cot might sound like a welcome relief.