You feel intense rage. There isn’t anything you can do with it. It’s not directed at a particular person, although people are part of it. It’s not about any given company or organization or institution, although all of those contribute to it. You want—need—to express something. You imagine if you could just find the right words, and put them in front of the right person then your rage might have some effect.
All the while you imagine this you also know it’s futile. There probably isn’t a “right person. If there was, how would you know, and how would you reach them? If you did, why would they listen to you? If they did, how could one message convince them or change their mind? Why should their mind need changing anyway; can’t they see what is so simple and obvious and infuriating to you?
All the while you know this you are still enraged. Frustrated. Disappointed that people make decisions you can see are wrong for reasons you can see are foolish or misguided or worse.
That rage, though. You need to express it, some way. Any way at all.
You’re not a violent person; you’re not going to physically attack anybody. And besides, you know that wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t do what you want, which is to change minds. Even just one mind. That’s not going to happen, but your mind is talented at ignoring what it—you—find uncomfortable. Everyone’s is, and in a less rage-filled moment you might reflect on how that connects to the very rage you’re feeling, and your feeling of impotence.
Your mind is talented in other ways, too, and so are other peoples’, and so you have some alternatives that you can at least hope will make a difference. You have Twitter and Facebook and SMS and email and even posterboard and markers. So you pick one, or two, or all of them, and start expressing yourself. your rage. Maybe it makes you feel better — the simple act of expressing. The feeling is there even though you know, really, that even if you can identify a particulr target of your rage, they probably won’t read your message. If, by some mind-boggling oddity they do, they most likely won’t care.
But you’ve created the message and put it out there in the world in some way. Like indecipherable graffiti on a never-again-seen boxcar, it rolls away on infinite rails and you think that has to count for something. Somehow, it’s got to. You need it to.
Even if it just serves to make somebody angrier.
