Our area has finally joined many of the municipalities in the United States by experiencing an act of rage. It probably had to happen sooner or later. Around 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, July 3rd, a woman took out her rage against Little League International by driving her minivan through the front door of the World of Little League Museum lobby. Thank God no one was injured, although four employees and about 40 guests were in the building at the time.
These are the Days of Rage in the United States, and it has been building up since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Rage is different from protesting or voicing grievances. The US Constitution actually included in the first amendment protection of the freedom of religion (yes, that was the first one), freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right to petition the government. Look at that list — three of the five have to do with the right to express your concerns openly in public.
However, even from the beginning, there were those who felt they had to make their point more violently, even at the highest levels of the US government. According to Yale history professor Joanne B. Freeman, there were more than 70 violent incidents between congressmen in the years leading up to the Civil War. The most famous was on May 22, 1856, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery southerner, walked over to Senator Charles Sumner, a northern advocate against slavery, and whacked him in the head with his cane until he was unconscious. He then walked calmly out of the chamber with no one stopping him.
The threats between northerners and southerners got so heated that many congressmen routinely carried pistols or knives when they stepped into the congressional floor. It is no wonder that reconciliation could not take place, and ultimately the violence resulted in the United States Civil War.
To bring us up to the 21st century, an article in the magazine Atlantic in 2004 noted that “America’s social-anger thermometer is on the rise…” and could possibly develop into the level of the Decade of Anger in the 1960s. This was spot-on as the riots that took place in May and June of 2020 in 140 cities following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody resulted in fires and property destruction that resulted in over $2 billion in damages. According to Property Claim Services (PCS), an organization that has tracked insurance claims related to civil disorder since 1950, these riots cost the insurance industry more than any ever recorded.
Rage actions have become almost commonplace in the past several years. Anger is part of the human condition. When we become frustrated against government officials, the courts, media, business entities, or even neighborhood residents — we now have outlets on social media to express our exasperation. But rage is something different. My own acronym for RAGE is Revenge Against Great Enemies. When a grievance grows in someone’s mind as something that must be stopped and even paid for, violence is almost always the response. To the ‘enraged,’ their actions are justifiable. This is what makes it so dangerous.
Aristotle once wrote, “The man who is angry at the right things and with the right people is praised.” Unfortunately, today, we have folks that get angry not just at the “right things” but over virtually anything and everything, and more times than not, it is directed at the vulnerable rather than the “right people.”
Wake up, Lycoming County. When even Little League International unwires someone enough to drive a vehicle through the front door of a museum and possibly injure innocent victims, nothing is off-limits to the raging enraged.
