Anger: Humanity's Achilles' Heel

"There is a harassed, knife-edge quality to daily life. Nerves are ragged and...tempers are barely under hair-trigger control. Millions of people are terminally fed up." [Alvin Toffler -The Third Wave]

It is no revelation that life and the living of it is a journey through a kaleidoscope of emotions that are coloured from a plethora of internal and external stimuli. Anger, associated with the colour Red on the spectrum, is unquestionably the most perplexing of the bunch intra-personally and inter-personally. In both spheres of its existence it is frequently experienced and yet seldom is it rationally considered and constructively examined. Most often it is nervously avoided, dismissed as irrational, or confronted in kind. Rarely is it understood and only exceptionally is it appreciated and regarded as reasonable. Yet, it is as natural a human emotion as happiness or sadness and no less logical and predictable in the circumstances that trigger it. It is prevalent in micro and macro group dynamics in familial, communal, societal and global arenas on a daily basis and yet it is shunned as a subject of genuine discourse and on the whole treated as a taboo topic. As natural as it is to the human condition and as frequently as it transpires, it is phenomenal how often it is stratified as inappropriate, intolerable and unnatural. 

Akin to the billions of galaxies that comprise the known Universe, anger is in equivalent abundance and has comparative complexity in its representations and manifestations in the human condition and in human inter-relations. Scores of millions have prematurely met their demise through the anger inherent in the hostilities of wars globally and regionally, as well as through genocides of antiquity and contemporary times. An estimated 45 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives in the Second World War alone, which wasn't really only the second global conflict; it was actually the sixth in a series of global wars dating back to 1618 and the start of the Thirty Years War.

The Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism in the years since 1948 have added scores more to graveyards the world over. The genocide in Rwanda and numerous other racially motivated massacres along with the killing of scores more by groups like ISIS in the name of religion have added immeasurably to the astronomical body count of human beings annihilated by the anger of others.  From archeological excavations to the study of primates and throughout the annals of mankind there is ample evidence that anger has been an ever-present aspect of the human condition and the experience of life since the dawn of our kind. 

Anger is hardly the sole purview of the military arms of nation states either; indeed it festers and ferments perpetually in all societies and cultures throughout the world. It knows no borders and is shared alike by all races, cultures, political communities and socio-economic classes. It is also neither gender nor generation specific. Adversarial and penal justice systems and institutions have been invented as a means to address it; laws and policies have been written in efforts to manage and curtail it; libraries are filled with research and commentaries on its root causes and the plethora of its consequences; and professions are devoted to responding to it, counselling about it, as well as medicating to try and tame, control and overcome it. Through it all, anger demonstrates its profound resilience. If one has ever witnessed a school yard fight, a bar room brawl, a boxing match or a hockey game when the gloves drop to the ice it's apparent anger can even be socially accepted, championed and cheered on feverishly. 

In communal, workplace, familial and domestic environments anger is also abundant and routinely vented. Political discord, racial tensions and even the outcome of sporting events routinely give rise to protests, riots and mob violence toward people and the institutions and entities of their making, as well as to the destruction of personal and public property. A massive body of research and courses of study focus on conflict resolution between managers and subordinates,  between peers, as well as between patrons of businesses and the employees that serve them. Careers are created and sustained solely devoted to offering psychological elixirs for managing the disgruntled and behavioural strategies for defusing and placating ire. Families and their domiciles are no less affected by anger and its expressions than any other stratum of human existence and can be as volatile and as decimating, or even more so, to individuals within them as between nations and their populations. Spousal abuse, sibling feuds, corporal punishment, and both physical aggressions as well as psychological tormenting are common place experiences in the lives of billions of relatives generation upon generation. Animals, and especially family pets, are even highly susceptible to being the subject of the wrath of Homo Sapiens of all ages, races, creeds, religions, sexes and sexual orientations. 

As this brief summary highlights, there seem to be as many words in language to describe anger in human interactions as there are occasions of it. There can be no doubt that it is humanity's Achilles' Heel. No human being is immune from it nor to it; it is an intrinsic part of the emotional arsenal naturally existing in everyone's psyche and within the interactions shared with all others. In my own life and its plethora of experiences I have been the subject of it, the perpetrator of it, exposed to it and collaterally affected by it more times than I can possibly recount. At 54 years of age, if I multiply the number of days I have been breathing by, conservatively, a half a dozen instances of anger affecting my psyche on any given one of them, it's in the range of 120,000 instances marked by the presence of anger in my lifetime alone. It is claimed that there are 60 times the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy as there are human beings on our planet. I would wager humanity's collective experiences with anger and expressions of it would dwarf that star count by astronomical proportions. 

In the various employment roles I have fulfilled through the past four decades in the restaurant & hospitality, security & loss prevention, health care, and golf & recreation industries I have been exposed to and affected by anger frequently. On numerous occasions daily I have also been responsible to manage and endeavour to resolve anger and its myriad expressions within amongst patrons and employees alike, as well as within myself. I believe it fair to say that through observation and osmosis from perpetual immersion in hostile interactions and environments I have not only been a student of it but also have accumulated substantial experience and significant expertise in managing and defusing it. Through all of it I have pondered and debriefed on its occurrences, studied its impacts on individuals and societies and quested to understand how best to combat and overcome it. 

After decades of living with it, studying it and addressing it, I have arrived upon one good answer to it, and I am not lightly saying so in a tongue-in-cheek manner. The answer is simple and indeed also natural; quite seriously, everyone with anger management issues should be smoking weed. 

Before discarding my hypothesis as silly or outlandish, it is appropriate to understand how I have arrived upon it. I have one particular life experience to site as an example, but I also have dozens upon dozens of others I can recount that are similar to it. Collectively they have all convinced me over time that Cannabis is in fact nature's remedy for combating and minimizing the impact of agitations and the expressions of anger arising from within the human psyche. 

In 1992 after graduating University I took a job as Night Manager of the Edmonton Inn, a large hotel property across the street from what was then the municipal airport. Within the hotel was a large Country & Western themed night club call Esmeralda's, a sports bar, a casual lounge and a couple of restaurants, along with several large banquet rooms and meeting spaces. It was then a busy and well frequented property with many conferences and conventions held there and numerous sports teams in the city for tournaments housed there as well. Every weekend and a lot of week nights as well Esmeralda's was filled to its 200 or so patron capacity and on a lot of nights angry patrons affected by alcohol became involved in physical altercations. As I recall, there was a Bouncer staff of at least six to eight strong guys on shift every night to manage whatever conflicts arose, and on frequent occasions the police also had to be called in to deal with the most unruly and agitated of patrons.

On one particular weekend the Edmonton Folk Music Festival was being held at Gallagher Park and many of the musicians and their road crews were staying at the hotel. The banquet rooms were utilized as a 24 hour Hospitality Suite for them to come and go from as they desired. At any given point on those Friday and Saturday nights there were upwards of 800 to a 1,000 people in those banquet rooms and the air was a bluish-grey haze of Pot smoke. Over those two nights there were no less than a half dozen serious fights that spilled out of Esmeralda's and into the parking lot, four separate instances requiring the police to be called and a couple where ambulances were required as well. Conversely, in the banquet rooms where up to five times the number of patrons were socializing while passing around joints there was not one single confrontation or fight amongst those in attendance all weekend long! 

I have worked the doors and on the bars of a lot of drinking establishments as well as supervised and managed the floors of a lot of cabarets and banquet rooms for wedding parties and golf tournaments over the past four decades. Time and time again I have observed the vastly different behaviours between those who swig back alcohol and those who suck back joints instead. The verdict is an easy one; alcohol consumption encourages and magnifies anger, while Cannabis use suppresses and eliminates it. Society is gradually coming to understand its benefits as a treatment for anxiety and PTSD in more recent years and more and more people are coming to appreciate its calming and euphoric influences on the psyche of its users as well. I dare say you will never find a group of pot-heads smashing all the glass in a neighbourhood bus stop or filling up Emergency wards in hospitals because of bar and parking lot brawls on most any given weekend across the country. Instead, you are much more likely to find them laughing it up and chatting while sitting in small groups in a park or on the beach, or while playing music and dancing, alone or together, in a care-free state. 

All of this is not to suggest that everyone needs to smoke Pot to suppress and eliminate anger, but for those who are challenged by control of that emotion it is to say that Cannabis can be a positive tool in its management based on my life's experience with it and around it. Anger is humanity's Achilles' Heel and a natural remedy for its treatment should not be illegal to possess and consume in this country or any other. That fact that it is today in many places is quite simply counter-productive, absurd and unnatural. Humans are always going to medicate with one substance or another. It makes sense to allow them to do so legally with a natural plant that actually achieves positive results and lessens the negative impacts arising from  humanity's propensity toward expressing the nastier qualities of its nature.