“What we need is a global coup d’état. What we need is to break the trance. What we need is to get uncomfortable. What we need is a Great Rewilding. What we need is to shift the current unsustainable paradigm. And the way we do these things is through sacred anger and hard love.” ~Gary Z McGee

“Love does not imply pacifism.” – Derrick Jensen

As it stands, all of us are victims of an extremely unhealthy culture. In a culture of conquer-control-consume-repeat we are endlessly conquered, controlled, consumed and forced into repeating and facilitating this diabolical process to no end. We’re like a bunch of spoiled-rotten, whiny children, taking our vexations out on each other and the environment when we should be digging down deep and transforming our comfortable inertia into courageous action. The question is: how do we break the cycle. One answer may be through sacred anger and hard love.

Here’s the thing: life was not meant to be comfortable. Sure, discover comfort where you can, but you’ll never grow if you don’t get uncomfortable every once in a while. Just like our culture will forever stagnate and degenerate if we don’t challenge how comfortable and contained it keeps us, especially when those comforts are systematically destroying the world. Like Anais Nin wrote, “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” Let’s choose not to fail. Let’s choose not to give into this kind of death. Let’s choose courage instead.

In our culture, anger is seen as politically incorrect. But deep, focused anger can be a boon of sacred energy if we can learn to use it wisely and courageously. Attentive, meditative anger can even be a form of empathy, as anger is often a natural response to horrific situations. Sometimes anger is not only the natural reaction, but the only moral reaction.

This is the kind of anger that lifts us up and compels us to protect the weak against the overreaching powerful or the poor against the overindulgent rich. The type of righteous anger that flips over tables like Christ did against the greedy bankers, the type of anger that would rather live a hard life of freedom than an easy life of slavery. Such anger is sacred precisely because it instills in us an unstoppable courage.

We should not be expected to remain calm and happy in the face of ecocide, rape, misogyny, slavery, and greed. Rather we should be compelled toward righteous anger. We should be obliged to help victims become warriors, screaming from the rooftops, “Take the Goddamned red pill for Christ’s sake! Become a freedom unto yourself! You are your own hero! Allow yourself to be worthy. Allow yourself to be extraordinary! Get angry! Get really pissed off! Then grab the bull by the horns and pin that bastard to the ground!” Like Gloria Steinem said, “The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.” Continue reading →