A Sergeant in the Marines

God said:

Sometimes language expresses itself perfectly. Weak with anger is an example of one of these perfectly exact expressions.

Anger definitely weakens. Strong with anger, you might as well foam at the mouth. Your hands may tremble. You are shaking in your boots, not from conscious fear, but from anger, another form of fear.

Why would you be full of anger if you were not fearful? Why on Earth would you feel a need to set the record straight with red-hot anger unless you were fearful?

Talk about righteous anger all you want. You will accomplish much more without the passion of anger. You may well accelerate your anger with righteousness. You can express yourself much better without anger and without self-righteousness.

Do you imagine that you are a sergeant in the Marines, and, if a private forgets to call you Sir, you are to bark at him?

When you are angry, you are not kind. You blow up. Anger begets anger. Anger can make you an authoritative bully. Everyone justifies his immediate anger. You can’t help it, for you are under the command of anger. If you can’t help but be angry, call it weakness. You can’t call it strength.

You have observed anger from others in action. It is not a pretty sight. You have seen parents hot with anger, focusing their anger on their young children. You may cringe for the young children. You may also cringe for the angry parent who has hidden away his or her love and replaced it with hot anger.

When you are furious, pound the pillow if you have to, yet not give reign to your rage.

Anger is a great offense to the world. There is a lot of it. There is too much of it.

Outrage is akin with hate. Do you really want to be outraged?

Find a way to deflate your anger without having to inflict it on the world. There are all those innocent people around you or far from you who catch the fall-out from your anger.

Anger is like the atomic bomb used to hurt.

Somehow you have been hurt, and you blow off steam. This is not a cure.

Take responsibility for your anger. Someone else is not responsible for your anger. Another is a smoke-screen for your fuming. Your happiness or unhappiness, your sense of peace or your sense of anger, your giving vent to love or your giving vent to anger come from within you. Own up to it. There is no justification for your hot anger. All your reasons are not justification.

You may think your anger comes from your innocent child’s getting muddy or whatever you may think causes your anger, yet your anger surfaces from within you.

Are you proud of your anger later when you have calmed down? Hardly. Not for long are you.

Find another punching bag. Run and set a new record for speed. Chop wood. Never mind the idea of expressing anger and venting anger as though this makes you a champion. It makes you a victim of your own hostility.

Do you really want to spend your life being angry? If you don’t, then climb the ladder of your evolution and see from a different angle.

Anger comes from how you see. Your anger is masking something, hiding where your anger really comes from through your bursts of anger, sending your anger up in smoke equal to Mt. Vesuvius.

You don’t have to like everything or anything, nor do you have to respond with anger. If you were not angry, you would do a much better job of expressing yourself and responding humanely. You don’t want to be the match that lights fires and hurts the atmosphere.

I know no cure for anger but a shift within you. Greater understanding from you can be a start. Sure, greater understanding of the one who seemingly set you off, and the real perpetrator behind your anger.

Dear Hotheads, turn your volume down.

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